Episode 001

Come on over, give it a listen, tell your friends! Hear Graveyard Greg lose it over the opening stinger for the Bloody Pen of the Ranting Editor!

-The Gneech

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150223186041807&oid=141884481557&comments#!/video/video.php?v=10150223186041807&oid=141884481557&comments … ugly URL is ugly.

-The Gneech

So somebody posted to me in a comment, “Are you on Twitter?” I was somewhat surprised by the question, given how much I talk about my various internet connections. I am the sinister spider at the center of a malignant web! Er, I’ve made an effort to reach out across a variety of platforms, because some readers prefer one over another and I’m trying to make my work available to everyone who might be interested. I am that needy an attention-hound.

So! For all those who are interested, here’s a rundown of the various ways you can find me online:

• gneech.com — Your one-stop Gneech shop. Includes all of the following links, as well as stories, reviews, periodic fits of madness, and bad poetry.
• RSS — An RSS feed of my gneech.com posts.
• LiveJournal — Still my “social medium” of choice, LJ also includes my more personal ramblings.
• Facebook — I don’t care for FB myself, but some of my readers use it exclusively.
• @the_gneech on Twitter
• Goodreads.com — My Goodreads.com author page. I could use some more friends there!
• Amazon — My Amazon author page, such as it is. Not the easiest thing in the world to maintain.
• DeviantArt — A smattering of my art.
• Artspots — A gallery of my furry art.
• FurAffinity — Another gallery of art. Warning: Not always the most family-friendly of sites.

…I think that covers ‘em all, or at least all the major ones. So! Pick your favorite and hang on for dear life! If anyone has suggestions for places I should be but I’m not, I’d love to hear them.

-The Gneech

There’s a lot to cover today! Starting at the top, I am looking with interest at the idea of doing a podcast on various fiction-related topics. Right now I’m trying to secure a pod-partner or two and work out the details, with an eye towards launching sometime this summer or fall. If there’s anything you’d be particularly interested in, or if you’d like to participate, let me know in the comments or via e-mail.

Next item: supernatural erotica, I freely admit, is not my cup of tea. However! If it is your cuppa, please check out The Arcane, by Mur Rathbun, an old pal of mine. I expect it’s quite lurid.

Speaking of checking out fiction, thanks to Jim van Pelt I have recently found out about Every Day Fiction, a website that provides a daily short story via e-mail or RSS feed. Very cool!

And if you want something longer than the average short story, check out The Economics of Niche Programming on the Overthinking It blog. Ostensibly about why good TV shows die young, it also has some interesting points about “the long tail” and how companies that thrive on it (Amazon, Netflix) operate.

So why did BSG succeed when Firefly failed? Why is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia entering its seventh season when Arrested Development struggled for three? What’s the element that those successful shows had in common?

When blogging for OTI, I try to avoid talking about the economic factors that go into the production of art. Economics can seem simplistic — like a “just-so story” — or reductionist. Why does The Walking Dead spend so much time at the campsite? Because they had a limited budget and could only shoot on a few sets. Done! Hit “Publish” and kick back until next week. When all you have is a bachelor’s degree in economics, everything looks like a widget factory.

But when talking about the overall logic of why one show succeeds and another largely identical show fails, economics can’t be avoided. You have to talk about what the market looks like, who the biggest producers and consumers are, and how the incentives line up.

And finally, because it suits the day somehow, let’s have a bit of brilliance from XKCD:

Catcha later!

-The Gneech

If anybody knows how, could you turn off the redirect that sends The Suburban Jungle wiki page to Keenspot? They’re fine and dandy guys, but SJ isn’t part of Keenspot these days.

I submitted an edit to the Keenspot wiki page to this effect, but I don’t know how to do the redirect fix and don’t want to muck it up.

-The Gneech

Noted here for my own reference as much as anything, Writing for Comic Books, by Joe Edkin. Lots of detailed discussion, well thought-out.

Definitely worth a read for comic creator-types!

-The Gneech