Comments Off on A very special DITCH DIGGERS featuring Kameron Hurley and Chuck Wendig is now live!

Late last year my longtime friend and fellow badass wordslinger Mur Lafferty and I created this new podcast thing called DITCH DIGGERS (in fairness Mur did/does most of the creating and I just kind of show up). We wanted to do a podcast, not about the craft of writing, which Mur covers just fine by herself on her long-running I SHOULD BE WRITING podcast, but about writing as a job. We recorded the first episode on the fly and kind of as a teaser, and it was the single most brutally honest conversation I’ve yet had about my writing career, and if you asked Mur I think she’d tell you the same.

Response was overwhelming. It shocked both of us.

It seems a lot of folks wants to know how to do this as a job.

Go figure.

We began the new year strong with our second episode talking about Kickstarter for writers, community, and money.

Now, in the newest episode of DITCH DIGGERS, Mur and I ramp it up to a drunkenly roaring altitude by welcoming onto the show heavyweight authors Kameron Hurley and Chuck Wendig!

Both of them.

At the same time.

I know.

We all poured several glasses of our favorite tipples and I forced everyone to talk about some of their worst professional defeats and what they learned from them. The result is a lot of laughing and wonderful nonsense interspersed with some of the most genuine and realistic portrayals of the fiction business to be found, composed by folks who really know what they’re talking about because they’ve been and are going through it.

This was the first time I actually got to have a live conversation with either of these two, and I had more fun than I can adequately convey in words. They’re the kind of writers and people who almost restore my faith in both writers and people (writers cannot be justly qualified as “people”).

For those who may be unaware (and get the fuck with it, the lot of you), Kameron Hurley is a two-time Hugo Award recipient and the author of what I believe was one of the best novels of 2014, THE MIRROR EMPIRE (the first part of her new WORLDBREAKER SAGA). She also authored the incredible, brutal BEL DAME APOCRYPHA series which I highly recommend as well. She’s one of the absolute finest fantasy authors going.

Chuck Wendig is the Campbell-nominated author of approximately eight bazillion running series ranging from cornpunk and crime/mystery YA to urban fantasy to UF-adjacent crime/noir. His novel THE BLUE BLAZES was my favorite book of 2013. He’s also purveyor of Terrible Minds, in my opinion the overall best fiction writing blog on these here interwebs.

They are genuinely two of my absolute personal favorite contemporary authors. I read them for pleasure. It’s sheer blind freakish coincidence I also happen to find them to be worthy mammals and enjoyable company. And to top all of that off, they’re also both incredibly insightful and knowledgable about writing as a business.

Go forth and be entertained and informed.

A lot of folks have also been asking us how to subscribe to DITCH DIGGERS specifically (the show being an off-shoot of Mur’s ISBW we didn’t really take the time to concern ourself with such demand).

While it’s not on iTunes yet, you can use this link for now to get all the ditch diggin’ action piped directly to you as we release more of it.

So, yeah. Subscribe. And tell your friends.

Thank you to Chuck and Kameron for agreeing to be part of our drunken authorial experiment, and I hope you’ll all badger them to come back on the show again.