Writings of Dan - Episode 00 "A Short Preview"

You may have noticed that I removed the "soon to be" red text from above "podcaster" in my blog's header. That's right, I have recently obtained a set up that I can record nice, clean, high quality audio on! I will now start to podcast my fiction. I can't say how excited about this I am. My eventual goal is to get my novels onto podiobooks.com, but first I must finish one, and edit the other :) In the mean time, I'll be podcasting one Fantasy short story next month titled "Good Things Come in Small Packages." In the month of May, I will podcast a Sci-Fi short story titled "My Last Day." I'd like to put out one short story a month until I release my first novel, and maybe at that point I will start a feed in iTunes. Until then, this is your one stop shop for podfic from Dan Dan The Art Man.

Episode Zero, a very short preview of what's to come, enjoy!

Download the mp3.
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What Have I Been Up To?

Listen to my droid R2D3PO read this post.

Much like you, I've been up to a lot, but much more than usual lately. Here are the main things:

1. Helping my father in-law finish my basement.
2. Celebrated my third wedding anniversary.
3. Finishing my NaNoWriMo novel including editing before July.
4. Editing a short story for submission into a writing contest.

1) Most of the work has been done by my awesome father in-law, but I've helped as well. I've been learning a lot, like how to frame in a wall and hang sheet rock on it. It's been pretty fun actually. We're adding two bedrooms and a bathroom downstairs, and we replaced the two sets of stairs in our house as well! Let's just say, it's been a HUGE project that's taken a few months. Before winter we added two egress windows for the bedrooms, so they would be legal and easy to exit in case of fire. We're down to hanging doors, painting, and adding trim now. It's been a long process, a lot of work and money, but it will be worth it for the extra space and value added to our house.

2) My amazing wife Kadi and I have now been married for three years, and it just keeps getting better. I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with her until the day I die. We traveled to Seattle and Portland over the weekends surrounding our anniversary, and I got off early the day of to take her out on a date. She rocks, and I love her very much. I can't imagine life without her or our son Seth.

3) I hit just over 50,537 words ononen November 28th, and now I'm up to 78,835 words. Since I managed to make it to the 50K mark during November, I can get a paperback of my book made and shipped to me for free. This was offered to all NaNoWriMo winners by CreateSpace, pretty cool. That said, I'm still a couple scenes away from thrusting into the climax and Act III of the story. I need to wrap it up and edit it so I can get a free paperback sent to me.

4) The story I submitted to critters.org to get critiqued is one I've been editing here and there. I found out that my local con, SpoCon, has a writing contest for short stories no longer than 5K words. I'll have to do some more cutting to get my story down to that point, and I'm still struggling with what to do with the ending. I like the way I wrote it, but everyone has said that they wanted it to end a different way. We'll see what I can come up with.

Ok, back to it now! By the way, the bathroom above, is the same bathroom in the first picture.