Announcements and Errata

If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve partnered with Audible.com through their podcast affiliates program.  And we’re as stoked about it as Voyager 6 at discovering human beings are the creator.  In other words, we’re completely straight-faced, without any sense of emotion whatsoever, as if we’ve discovered everything there is to know and have nothing else to do but fulfill basic programming.  Maybe that’s not such a great analogy… Anywho.  The idea is pretty simple.  You sign up for a trial membership with Audible.com, Audible hugs us with giant bear arms (just like in the 2nd Amendment), and everyone comes out on top — we get hugs, you get a free audiobook (and, we hope, a lifelong love of Audible’s services), and Audible realizes that it will only take a few more years before it can take over the world using its self-replicating spider robots… But here’s where things get really fun.  To make things interesting, we’ve created a mad lib and want to solicit word suggestions from you, our dear listeners.  Every week, we’ll record a new version of the mad lib using words chosen by all of you.  Next season, we’ll write a whole new version and repeat the process.  This will make it a lot more fun for us, and for you, because our little dialogue will always be filled with wacky nonsense! So, for our second mad lib Audible advertisement, we’d like to solicit word suggestions.  Here’s what we need: 9 x Thing 4 x Adjective 3 x Verb 1 x Feeling 1 x Date 1 x Place The rules: 1) Nothing filthy. Mad libs tend to end up suggestive all on their own, but we don’t want to intentionally waltz into dirty territory. 2) Nothing with the obvious potential for offence (racial slurs, etc.). Start suggesting! You can suggest all at once, or just throw in some random things. We’ll pick from the lot.

We’re looking for guests.  Not just any guests, mind you, but guests with new books coming out this year!  As of right now, we have a number of slots open in April and May, and practically everything from July on is empty.  That won’t be true for long, of course, but we do want to put out a call for particular kinds of works, as much of our interview requests happen to be for urban fantasy and traditional epic fantasy. Here’s what we’d really like to see: Science fiction (we don’t get nearly enough and we would really like our two-episode interview arc for each month to split 50/50 along the genre line) Books by women, and, in particular, science fiction books by women (we’ve had a lot of wonderful ladies on the show, and will have a few more this year, but we would really like to see some women authors with SF novels approach us) Books by people who aren’t American, and following that, by people who are not America, Canadian, or British.  In other words: we’d like to have some World SF folks on this show (we have a few potentials thanks to Lavie Tidhar).  Basically, we are interested in diversity of nationality, race/ethnicity, and gender. LGBT (or GUILTBAG) SF/F, whether written by LGBT people or containing themes and/or protagonists relevant to the LGBT community Beyond that, we want requests for books which vaguely fit within the SF/F genres, or are related to them in some way (such as cool science stuff or non-fiction which is related in some way to the SF/F world).  When we say SF/F, we do not mean a very rigid set of conditions for what is and is not SF/F.  Anything vaguely fantastic is of interest to us; see our guidelines for the kinds of authors we love who might not be considered SF/F writers by certain circles (we want to interview writers like that too). To be clear about one thing:  We are not saying you should not contact us if you do not fit into any of the above groups.  Rather, we are simply saying that we would like to see more requests for the above things. Our only limitations are the following: Traditionally published novels, whether from the big six or small presses (with some exceptions, though not many) No erotica.  We don’t mind sex in a story, regardless of the form.  But we’re not interested in stories whose purpose is to serve as an aphrodisiac (hopefully that makes sense) Please note that we try to schedule interviews near the release date; likewise, we cannot take everyone who wants to be on the show for an interview, though we are certainly happy to include authors in our discussion episodes.  If you’d like to be a part of that, let us know.  Our previous discussion guests:  Jason Sanford, Tobias Buckell, Liz Bourke, Paul Genesse, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Kay Kenyon, John Ottinger, Adam Callaway, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Mike Brotherton, and James Knapp.  You can check our our interview list here. Our email:  skiffyandfanty[at]gmail[dot]com ———————————————————————— P.S.:  We will start putting out requests of our own in the near future.  Generally speaking, we like authors to contact us.