Writing Excuses Season 1 - My fave episodes

As mentioned before, I'm listening to the podcast Writing Excuses starting with season 1, and I just realized I'd better post my Favorite Posts after each season, rather than months from now when I'm done.

Season 1 Best of...

#1 Blending the Familiar and the Original - My dad recently heard that musicologists have found that the music that pleases us is that perfect balance of hearing the expected, and then having the unexpected thrown in. This podcast is about that idea, applied to lit.

#2 This Sucks and I'm a Horrible Writer is about more than just pepping you up when you're feeling down on your writing. It's more about learning to finish things, and some of the common ditches writers fall into that prevent them.

#3 We all fall into the too much exposition trap sometimes, so this discussion on the subject is good. It's with Patrick Rothfuss, who's written one of the most popular new fantasies in the last few years.

Bonus - If you have a specific interest, like horror or humor, it's worth doing a search on their site. They have good discussions on these too--which is nice since most topics both here and elsewhere tend to be about sci fi fantasy. They have good SFF sub-subjects too, like writing religious systems.

 

• The above links will take you to the episodes which are free to download.
• The whole archive is here. It's free, but if you don't like all the downloading you can buy previous seasons on dvd here.
• If you want to follow them here's the itunes link, or use their RSS feeder.

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If you want to know more about the podcast...

Right now Writing Excuses is a four person team, but in season 1 it consisted of:

Brandon's written fantasy, like his Mistborn series, as well as young adult humor-fantasy, and is now the guy finishing Robert Jordan's series. He's the formal host of the show, and the straight man. The kid who sits in the front of class and takes notes, and for the podcast--keeps things on track.

Dan's his longtime writing friend who has a series about a teen sociopath, and writes other horror.

Howard has been writing a long-time online sci fi comic (Schlock Mercenary), which I've been reading it's quite funny. He and Dan play the part of the kids in the back of the class making jokes, with Howard as the butt of half of them.

That's our hero: Schlock

But actually all three make really interesting contributions to the discussions. If they disagree, they don't go on and on and they don't tend to beat subjects to death--they're good at stopping themselves or each other if they go off track or stop making sense. And they're funny.

I really recommend the podcast. And if you start with the newer ones, Mary's really funny too--she writes a series about a magical Regency world.