Comments Off on When it’s NOT okay to suck, plus SFF titan Ken Liu! A new episode of Ditch Diggers is live!

We’re back, folks.

Campbell Award-winning author Mur Lafferty and Knott’s Berry Farm Ghosts of the Old West 12-and-Under Short Story Contest-winning author Matt Wallace have returned for a new episode of Ditch Diggers, the podcast about writing as a job.

This is, no bullshit, one of my favorite episodes we’ve done thus far. “It’s okay to suck” is the mantra on which Mur built her flagship podcast, I Should Be Writing, over the last decade. Now it’s time to talk about when it’s NOT okay to suck, professional standards, and how to hold yourself to them. We also take questions from Twitter, which prompts one of my proudest rant-related moments, about compromise as a necessary skill for working writers.

Finally, Mur has an interview recorded live as Boskone with author Ken Liu, a true ditch digger. Ken talks frankly about his seven-year dry spell during which he didn’t sell a single story and what caused it. Ken is now one of the most recognized authors of short fiction in SFF, and his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, just came out in April. It’s a great interview with great perspective.

Click here and listen to the episode!

And don’t forget to subscribe in iTunes, and tell every damn writer you know about the show.