Thursday, December 23, 2010

ThrillerCast Episode 9 - The Trent Jamieson Episode

A supersized Christmas Eve special episode today, featuring a review of Trent Jamieson’s new urban fantasy thriller, followed by an interview with Trent himself. We get a good insight into bookselling as part of the interview, as Trent works in a bookshop.
Alan’s review of Death Most Definite

Interview with Trent Jamieson

Brisbane as a place and a character

Do people plan to write thrillers?

Trent’s favourite reads

Trent on mythology

Where does the Death Works series go from here?

Trent on working in a book store and the nature of returns and the shelf life of books

Selling books that cross genre

Reading broadly

Trent explains what a Psychopomp is in the Death Works universe

We discuss in detail the nature of writing in first person present tense over third person narrative, and why writers might use it

Sunday, December 12, 2010

ThrillerCast Episode 8 - Escapism in Fiction- Realistic Writing vs Fantastic

Click here to download this episode!

Show notes:

Halloween chat - Dave and Alan talk about what they’re doing and what Halloween writing projects they have on the go. (Hereby showing how our podcasts are about a month and half behind!)

Other good Halloween reading:

Felicity Dowker’s lesbian zombie story in Scary Kisses, from Ticonderoga Press.

Jim Bernheimer’s zombie power story in Horror, Humour and Heroes anthology.


We go on to talk about the nature of ebooks, and authors self-managing their own ebook publishing and sales.

Ebooks outselling print books at Amazon and the various ereaders starting to crop up in regular stores.

The spread of ereaders in the public domain.

William Gibson and how he doesn’t write sci-fi any more because we live in a sci-fi world.

Is old sci-fi disappointing now because we’ve surpassed the ideas of the old SF stories?

What about adventure stories? Do they hold up to the test of time?

Main topic: Escapism



Why do SF writers enjoy writing in the genre.

Anne Hamilton’s post about SF being worthless due to being escapism.

Is contemporary non-genre fiction actually more escapist than fantasy or science fiction?

Does being a writer spoil the reading (escapist) experience?

.