grahambinns.com - Blog Posts in Podcasts

I just can't stop my lips from flapping

Graham Binns — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:09:35 +0100

The latest (and slightly delayed) edition of the Ubuntu UK Podcast is out, containing an interview with yours truly, alongside Matt "mdz" Zimmerman, Matthew "mpt" Thomas, Rob "lifeless" Collins and Stuart "aquarius" Langridge. So, basically, one dumb northerner yakking about Launchpad amongst a sea of scary geniuses, then. Link

Categories: planet ubuntu uk podcasts ubuntu ubuntu uk podcast

"Playing for Keeps" launches on November 1st

Graham Binns — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 18:03:31 +0100

Mur Lafferty, podcasting goddess, has created a site for her new free podcasted novel Playing For Keeps, the first instalment of which is set to go live on November 1st.

Based on the quality of her previous work it's sure to be a blinder, so I suggest that you all go and subscribe and wait, breath baited, for pearls of auditory goodness to rain from your speakers.

Categories: mur lafferty podcasts

Farewell to Geek Fu

Graham Binns — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 18:59:17 +0100

Mur Lafferty, writer, podcaster and tiara-wearing queen of wannabe writers is putting Geek Fu Action Grip on indefinite hiatus for reasons which I have no business repeating here (go there, use ears, understand).

I first came across Mur and her work when, Googling for writing resources, I found I Should Be Writing. I subscribed to Geek Fu some time after that. Mur's great gift is in making one feel like an equal, no matter the subject matter. Geek Fu will be missed, though I'm glad that ISBW will continue since it gives me a great deal of motivation (and also acts as an archive of those bits of advice that I need to have repeated to me constantly).

For more of Mur's work, such as the highly acclaimed Heaven and Hell podiobooks and their successor, Earth, take a look at geekfuactiongrip.com and ishouldbewriting.com.

Categories: geek fu action grip i should be writing mur lafferty news podcasts

Pointedly pointless posts sometimes have a point, you know

Graham Binns — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:50:00 +0100

I was going to write a post about what I hate about professional sports. But when I got most of the way through it I realised that I had written a self-defeating argument so I'll just have to save it for later when I can think up something coherent to say.

I'm very, very tired right now, having not slept well for several nights. Tonight's trip to the gym seems to have worked wonders, though. Instead of feeling mentally tired but physically wide awake I'm now in a position where everything is just about hanging on to consciousness.

But I've been very productive for a tired man. Besides work on Das Projekt I've managed to do some (though not a whole lot) of editing, and best of all I've started on a new story, the first in some time, plucked from the pages of my fast-filling ideas notebook.

But the point of this otherwise pointless post is this: I still have a libsyn account and figured that I might as well use it. If I were to podcast some of my shorter fiction, would you good, kind people want to listen to it?

And I genuinely want to know the answer, by the way. Comments or emails (binnsblog at googlemail dot com) are welcome. Let me know.

Categories: podcasts writing

Bearded and Broke

Graham Binns — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 22:21:00 +0100

You can tell I'm working hard when my procrastination involves, variously, installing Fedora Core 5 on a VMWare virtual machine, just for the sake of having a play, taking photos of my currently bearded self and listening to the umpteen editions of the Celtic Music News Podcast that have slowly accumulated in my CastPodder downloads folder like a drift of mp3-compressed snowflakes.

As you can see from the sidebar the work-in-progress is going not-too badly. My work rate has been decreased a little by the fact that it's currently all handwritten. The lack of a laptop hasn't impacted on me over-much other than to make me learn to write a little more readably on my spiral-bound pads, but it has slowed me down a bit because I can't manage more than three or four sides of A4 (about 1,000 words) a time without getting cramp. I had thought that the story was only going to be about 5,000 words long, but at the moment it's looking like it's going to be nearer the 7,000 mark. As long as it works that's fine with me. Most of the work I've done so far has been done in Lancaster's Caffé Nero, which has made it a somewhat expensive 4,000 words as words go. There's no better place to write than in cafés. It's easy to get lost in the susurrus and there's nothing to distract you, but it is prohibitively costly to do it for any length of time. I don't know how Rowling managed to afford to write Harry Potter in cafés, though I suppose she wasn't going into one where a single cup of coffee costs you a quarter of the money you'd usually spend on lunch in a week. Perhaps I should find a slightly cheaper drink to drink whilst I'm writing (Starbucks, though we don't have one in Lancaster, do serve ridiculously cheap but ludicrously big cups of tea). Maybe I need to find a cheaper place to write, too.

I'm wondering how to get back round to podcasting again. I still have the libsyn account, which seems a bit silly if I'm not producing anything. I'm loathe to ask whether anyone wants me to start podcasting again, partly because you can count the readers of this blog without ripping off anyone else's limbs, and partly because of the stubborn person in my head saying 'It's not up to them, it's up to you, fool.' At the moment I'm thinking of restarting the podcast when I start the hard copy edits on the novel, and podcasting that experience. We shall see.

Categories: photography podcasts writing

Voices

Graham Binns — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 13:44:00 +0100

Enjoying the hiatus from writing, but itching to get back to it. Tonight I'll be getting started on - or rather getting to the middle on - a short story that I've been scribbling away at during downtime (usually when waiting to pick Sarah up or at spare moments during the day) for the last couple of weeks. I think I know pretty much all of the story at this point; it's more of a vignette than a full blown story and should be a couple of thousand words at most, and hopefully it won't take more than a couple of days to finish. After that, well, the world's my mollusc. I've got more ideas than you could shake a goat at, so I'm looking forward to having some fun. I'll probably be podcasting some of the shorter stories too, depending on how they turn out, so watch this space for news.

In the meantime, here's something to keep you entertained. Mur Lafferty of I Should Be Writing and Geek Fu Action Grip has edited Voices: New Media Fiction, a podiobook anthology of stories, which is now online at Podiobooks.com. From the blurb:

Voices: New Media Fiction brings together the pioneer short fiction podcasters. Experimenting from putting short-short fiction to novellas over their podcasts, these writers were the first to test the new medium for storytelling. Some wrote specifically for podcasts, some read previously published fiction, and some read entirely new stories. Some listeners asked if they could get just the stories in audio form, and that request brought about this podiobook. Cory Doctorow tells us a story about a post-apocalyptic government run by sysadmins and James Patrick Kelly narrates a story of a strange reconciliation. We've collected 18 stories for you, the first short fiction to go out over podcast, and look forward to bringing you more.

Categories: podcasts writing writing ideas

The Todo List

Graham Binns — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 15:06:00 +0100

I should know better than to not save my drafts before trying out some new feature of Firefox that I've never tried before. Grr.

Tempted as I am, though, to file the just-lost post under "Fuck it, I'll do it later" I'll try to start again.

Where was I? Oh yes.

I have lots to be getting on with this weekend. For one thing the Manchester Starbucks Session didn't yield nearly as much actual work done as I'd hoped it would. This was mainly due to the fact that, as I mentioned, I seemed to have been stricken with a self-inflicted bout of the lurgi, and as such spent my first hour in Starbucks in a semi-incoherent state, staring out of the windows like a zombie and occasionally gibbering. I didn't, however, eat anyone's brains (so far as I remember at least), which is a plus point.

Once perked up by a large and cheerfully cheap mug of peppermint tea (an apparent cure for all my ails, though one which had hitherto lain undiscovered) I managed to get five hundred words written before Sarah returned from her travels and it was time to go to Wagamama for food. Five hundred is better than none, true, but I had been hoping to get more words written - something in the range of fifteen hundred would have been nice. Still, as has been said, beggars can't be choosy and writers have only themselves to blame.

So I've got to get caught up on the word count today, and though I've given up all hope of getting to the 100,000 word mark by Thursday I'm still hopeful that I'll get to be somewhere in the general area of it. The trouble is that I've got a lot to get done today, including some UML design stuff for work that I didn't get a chance to finish during last week. There's also an short story that came to me yesterday and is begging to be written. I don't know whether that's something that I ought to do at this point, close as I am to finishing the novel, so I'm going to wrestle it into a notebook and hope that it stays quiet until I'm done. As if that weren't enough to be getting on with, I've got a podcast to get out, though you'll have noticed that I'm no longer making the stupid mistake of making promises about when it's going to come out. Perhaps that can be one of the features of A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust: regular irregularity, as it were.

Anyway, to work. Otherwise I'll start talking about all the new and shiny things that I want to buy, and then we'd be here all bloody day.

Categories: podcasts work writing writing ideas

A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust - Fit the Fifth

Graham Binns — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 20:27:00 +0100

Wherein our hero wishes all his (few but precious) listeners a happy new year and talks about his presence. Or is that presents? (Ah, the old ones are the bad ones, aren't they?).

Links from the show:

Download Fit the Fifth | Subscribe to the feed | Subscribe to the Odeo Channel

Categories: podcasts

Hippodust

Graham Binns — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:47:00 +0100

Delayed until Monday at the earliest. Too tired to even write, let alone record a podcast.

But I passed 70,000 words (miniw00t), so not all's bad in the world.

Have a great Christmas/Yule/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah/Give-me-stuff-day, whatever your religious leanings or inclinations. See you later.

Categories: general podcasts

A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust - Fit the Fourth

Graham Binns — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 22:21:00 +0100

Wherein our hero emerges from the depths of November into the light of coming Christmas (that sounds far too religious; I apologise) and talks about honesty and truth in fiction, why it's not an oxymoron and why it's important, and also reveals his (very tenuous) link to a certain 25ft-tall Gorilla.

No links this week. I rambled on without any external help whatsoever.

Apologies for the slightly tinny sound. Something to resolve for next time, that is.

Download Fit the Fourth | Subscribe to the feed | Subscribe to the Odeo Channel

Categories: podcasts

One always finds things to do...

Graham Binns — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 16:05:00 +0100

I would be recording Fit the Fourth of A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust right now, except that I noticed this morning that I needed to move my root partition onto a different hard drive. The terminal telling me that I had run out of space on the original drive was a big hint.

So here I am, working in the ever useful DSL, copying things from partition to partition and, in the process, reminding myself just how much crap I've installed.

So the podcast will be here, but late, I'm afraid. I'm sure you'll live.

Categories: computing home linux podcasts

Well slap me on the arse and call me Miranda

Graham Binns — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 23:04:00 +0100

Interesting. It seems that, since putting up the brief bio on the right hand side of this page, I've suddenly become the top-ranked result for "Graham Binns" in Google UK's database. Excellent.

In other news, the novel goes well. At 62,000 words it seems to be clicking along nicely, though I'm starting to worry that I'm going to struggle to tie everything up within 100,000 words. On the other hand, if I go over 100,000 that isn't necessarily a bad thing. As Stephen King says, 1st draft = 2nd draft - 10%.

And, now that I've got some life back in me after the rigours of NaNo, I'm going to get on with podcasting again. A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust, Fit the Fourth, should be out this week, barring any unforseen nonsense on my part.

Categories: podcasts writing

A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust - Fit the Third

Graham Binns — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:59:00 +0100

Wherein our hero finally gets round to recording a podcast, apologises for not doing so already, and then discusses NaNoWriMo and his notebook fetish.

With extra slurpy noises for added effect and a little swearing for flavour.

This week's word count:

0 / 90,000
(0.0%)

Links from the show:

Download Fit the Third | Subscribe to the feed | Subscribe to the Odeo Channel

Categories: nanowrimo podcasts

Breezyfication

Graham Binns — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 16:41:00 +0100

Having taken the day off work through being absolutely exhausted (caused by having to sleep in a chair two nights in a row, for reasons which will become apparent to those who don't know why already soon enough), I have managed to complete a podcast. No, really. It's all recorded; it's just got to be edited down and it'll be out in the world tonight.

In other news I have successfully Breezy-fied my PC. It was a lot less painful than I thought. Getting VMWare to work had the potential to be a bit of a pain but in fact, once I'd worked out a couple of package-related issues it was as smooth as could be expected. You can find Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (the Breezy Badger) installation and live CDs from the Ubuntu website. I heartily recommend that you try them.

Categories: linux podcasts

Promises, promises

Graham Binns — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 18:05:00 +0100

Well, so much for promising a podcast. So much has been happening in the last week that I haven't had the time or the energy to put one together. I have lots of pieces of raw audio, though, so I'm sure that some well-judged editing will see me right for a podcast tomorrow. It's a week overdue, but never mind.

Preparations for NaNoWriMo are going well. I've started by outlining the story, including the work that I'd done already, and although I haven't so far got much further than I had in the existing text I've managed to come to a better understanding of my main characters and their motivations, as well as solving a few knotty plot problems that were already becoming apparent by the 11,000 word mark.

One thing that's odd in participating in NaNoWriMo, for me at least, is that the 50,000 word limit that is set for the competition isn't anything near what I'm going to be aiming for in the long term. In order for the novel to be at all publishable, especially since it's by an unknown author with no publishing credits to his name, it has to be somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 words, which means that NaNoWriMo is going to have to account for just half of the story.

On one hand that's a good thing; I won't be able to just sit back and relax once (if) I've completed the 50,000 words. I'll need to keep going, probably through December and into January, before I'm able to go back and do the first set of rewrites. On the other hand I have to constantly be aware that I can't let the story rush by in 50,000 words and then not have anything to fill the other 50,000 with. That hasn't been a problem so far but I can see it becoming one if my imagination starts to run out of steam.

In other news, I've already put down the opening page or two for The Great Christmas Story Without Ghosts 2005. Regardless of how I'm doing on the novel in December I'll try to get this finished in time for Christmas or at least New Year. I know roughly what the plot is going to be, and hopefully it'll explore some of the moral ambiguities of Santa's job whilst being nice and warm and wacky at the same time. Well, warm in places and wacky at any rate. I can't guarantee nice.

Categories: nanowrimo podcasts writing

A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust - Fit the Second

Graham Binns — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 18:13:00 +0100

Wherein our hero reviews Serenity and blethers briefly about the pitfalls of outlining and plotting when writing a novel.

This week's word count:

11,517 / 80,000
(14.0%)

Links from the show:

Download Fit the Second | Subscribe to A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust | Subscribe to the Odeo Channel (odeo/21b58a9bc8dea9e8)

Categories: podcasts

A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust - Fit the First

Graham Binns — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 09:22:00 +0100

Well, I did say I was going to try a podcast, didn't I? So here it is:

A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust, Fit the First.

Wherein our hero talks about himself for fifteen minutes and tries to figure out what podcasting is all about.

Links from the Show

I Should be Writing The Secrets

Download Fit the First | Subscribe to A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust

Categories: podcasts