Got your hot chocolate in hand, your toes well-wrapped in a blanket and the dog asleep beside you?

Well, after wrestling GarageBand into submission tonight [quite a comeback, as it nearly had me pinned several times], here’s this week’s Bedtime Story.

As usual, you can find it on my podcast page at http://kcdyer.podomatic.com/, or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the player below.

As a kind of window into the process of [at least this particular] writer, this is an element of a story that will quite likely not fall at the beginning when the whole thing shakes down. [Confused? What did you expect when I invited you into the process? It’s darned complicated inside this brain!*]

Anyway, it’s from a series called THE YOUNG KNIGHT, about a kid named Hamish who decides he’s going to be a superhero, medieval-style. He drags/coerces/blackmails his sister Allie into the fray as the unwilling [and usually worried] chronicler of his adventures.

Here’s the first peek at THE YOUNG KNIGHT. This is part one of a chapter called THE ARCHER. Hope you enjoy!

 

 

More soon…

 

 

~kc

 

* I will add that when I _do_ get the whole series of THE YOUNG KNIGHT stories down, I’ll find a way to order the podcasts properly. Trust!

Today’s Friday and that means it’ll be a bedtime story tonight. Which I haven’t decided on yet. Or recorded. Or mixed. Or found appropriate artwork for. Or figured how to monetize.

However. It’s one of those things you just do for the love of it, you know? The storytelling joy.

Like building a tardis. From scratch. Foldable.

Like this very adorable teacher from Germany did.

I think everyone who watches this should choose the ‘marry her’ option. She is so cute and wonderful and can you imagine having her as a teacher? The BEST.

Anyway, even though I have NO time today, and I haven’t done any of my own work [see first paragraph], I was still so mesmerized by this that I watched the whole thing.

Because…why not?

[It _is_ Friday, after all…]

 

Enjoy! More soon… ~kc

My friends [and fellow authors] Kallie George, Lee Fodi and James McCann put a movie together for their time travel camp last summer, and producer/director Luke Spence Byrd has just released his ‘director’s cut’.

Here it is in all its glory…can an Oscar be far behind?

 

More soon… ~kc

photo by Jamelah, via FlickerTrying something new here…

 

 

 

You can listen to the story right here on the site, or you can mosy over to my podcast site and listen there: http://kcdyer.podomatic.com/

 

 Your choice!

 

Remember to get safely tucked in first…it is a bedtime story, after all.

 

 

 

Sweet dreams.

 

 

 

More soon…

 

 

~kc

 

Tomorrow many significant internet sites [most of ’em American, but not all…] will go dark to protest the possibility of the passage of a couple of scary legislative bills in the US.

The thing I like about the internet is that I can cruise around and get as much information on any topic my wildest imagination can dream up. [Note: Pretty wild.] I’ve also learned to take with a grain of salt much of what I read — some of it makes me laugh, and some of it makes me mad, and some of it helps me learn.

The worry in the US right now is that upcoming legislation could lead to a kind of on-line libel freeze — that if you, I or Wikipedia links to a site that publishes questionable information, that we, as link-ers, are subject to lawsuit should said information prove indeed to be suspect.

Here’s a piece from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that explains things a bit more thoroughly: https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8173

I’d really like to link you to the boingboing explanation of why this is also worriesome for nations other than the USA, but they’ve gone dark already. Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter…they’re all going dark tomorrow in solidarity against this legislation.

To finish, here [via the divine @MaryRobinette Kowal] is a piece to shed a little final LOLcat light on the matter. 

And if you are in the US, a letter to your representative would be a good idea right about now!

 

 

 

More soon…

 

~kc

 

photo by jiihaa, via Flickr, creative commonsHello there, creatures of the night. How are you this fine evening? I’ve heard it’s supposed to snow in my environs, but right now all I can hear is rain on the roof. Perhaps later the chill will settle and I’ll awaken to a world of white…

But for now, let’s get cosy and share a story, shall we? Yes indeed — it’s Friday night, and that means it’s time.

[Actually, any time is a good time. That’s why I’ve got these archived for your listening pleasure, whenever you want ’em.]

Tonight’s tale is called KNOCKED INTO YESTERDAY. And, as you might hear me muttering about this at the end of the bit, I’m not actually sure it works that well when read aloud, seeing as it requires an extra thought or two with regard to — ah — chronology.

[Also, small problem with my female voice and my male m/c.]

Ah, well. We can’t have everything, can we?

I’d be delighted to hear feedback, either way.

Now cuddle in, pull the covers up, and have a listen. All these stories are under 10 minutes — just long enough to drift away to.

KNOCKED INTO YESTERDAY, Episode 2 of kc dyer’s Bedtime Stories.

Night!

 

More soon…

 

~kc

Anyway. Let

Hey, it’s been Plague Week here around kc dyer central, so the blogging’s been a bit scarce. Too busy coughing my lungs up into my hands… but that luscious imagery aside, all is well again and a bedtime story will be forthcoming this evening, as is the new normal.

In the meantime, though, a thought.

Wonderful writers Diane Duane* and Peter Morwood had their bank account completely cleaned out this week by a fraudster. The bank will replace the missing money once the investigation is complete, but in the meantime they have mouths to feed and bills to pay. If you are thinking you might spend some of your post-Christmas dough on an ebook, why not give one of their titles a try? My daughter has been a Young Wizard’s fan _forever_, so I think the ebook series would be perfect to add to her collection of paperbacks. Go have a look here if you’d like to help these writers through a tough time: http://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com/

 

*Diane is a wildly prolific and inventive S/F/F author. In addition to the Young Wizard and a number of other original series, she’s written Star Trek books, Spiderman and X-men stories, comic books and more. Peter has written a whack of series of his own, and together they’ve written a ton of material for tv and movies.

 

More soon…

 

~kc

Well.

Another super-sekrit project now no longer in the sekrit file.

A little background. I’ve been doing a substantial edit on my steampunky novel lately, and a big edit like this one requires a little motivation.

In this case, I’ve been writing some super-short stories to boost my productivity. So, just for fun, I’ve decided to podcast them in a series called

kc dyer’s Bedtime Stories

Some of them are for littler kids and some are for bigger kids [I haven’t yet figured out how to sort them], but it’s a little experiment I’m just putting out there. A few are for grownups, too, so we’ll just see how this all plays out, shall we?

I’ve been planning this one for more than a year, and my initial effort’s come off surprisingly amateurish for something with such a long planning lead-up, but what the heck. Learning experience and all that.

If you’d like to listen, you can find it here:

http://kcdyer.podomatic.com/

and you can listen and subscribe, and tell your friends, if you’d care to.

I plan to post a new story every Friday night. We’ll see how it goes together, shall we?

And now…I must hie me off to another blog post for my sorely neglected on-line creative writing class.

A nerdish girl’s work is never done, it seems.

More soon…

 

~kc

Best year ever, so far, right? And it’s not even a day old.

I’m currently hard at work behind the scenes, readying your new year’s treat, which should appear, if all goes well, this Friday. And every Friday thereafter, for ever and ever, amen.

Or at least for the time being.

More on that soon, soon, me pretties.

In the meantime, a quick check-in with writing-desk progress.

As those of you following me on twitter know, I have been loudly lamenting the untimely break-down of my treadmill desk, which began to give up the ghost long, long ago in the distant past [otherwise known as early September]. After many trials and botched repair attempts, it is finally back among the living, and I have been walk-working again in December with great delight. [None too soon, for all those touring and holiday calories have been roundifying your humble scribe. NOT a happy thing…]

Regardless, at the turn of the year, it behooves me to once again address the distances I might have crossed, were I to have been walking straight east across this fair land. And, even though the treadmill let me down for three months this year, I still have pleasant progress to report. 

This year I managed 1218.5 km, a nice improvement over the 1027ish that I totalled in 2010. I attribute this increase to the bit of running I added to the mix, which ups the total distances when all the other variables remain equal. I didn’t start walking until March 18th, 2010, so the amount of missed monthage works out to roughly the same. However, I ran just about 500 km of the above distance this year [okay, so 499 if you want to get technical…if I’d known it was that close I would have pushed on the additional distance!] and that had a little bearing, I believe.

In terms of my imaginary cross-Canada trek, you’ll see from the map here that I’ve walked or run a grand total of a little over 2245 km from my starting point on the BC coast, which puts me somewhere along the Portage La Prairie by-pass in the beautiful province of Manitoba.

Whoah. This is a bi-i-i-i-i-i-g country. It’s taking me a decent amount of time to walk across it, eh?

But I feel like every minute walking is one less that I am sitting, so fist in the air for walking writers!

And hey — it’s the beginning of a new year. Any plans of your own to halt the insidious writer’s spread that comes from labouring in a chair all day?

All ideas welcome — share in the comments, if you’d care to. And happy 2012 — here’s to a healthy one for all!

 

More soon…

 

~kc

…plan is in the works for me and this blog. Nothing earth-shattering, mind you — just a little something I’ve been working on for a while, and I hope you’ll enjoy.

What are YOUR plans for 2012? It is, after all, supposed to be kind of a bad news story, at least if you listen to what the Mayans had to say. And if everyone’s done the math right. And if the stars align…

Sounds like a lot of ‘ifs’ to me. So here’s my proposal. What IF… we just take things into our own hands, and make the life we have right now the best we can make it? Create our own magic. Build our own dreams.

‘Cause what you have RIGHT NOW, right this minute, is exactly what you have. Most of the stuff you can’t change. But some you can. So I say we dream about what we want, who we want it with and find a way to build our own happy.* Join me?

[* Caveat: Aforementioned advice was formulated by a writer, one among a class of the weirdest mix of scardy-cat, depressive, realist, cock-eyed optimist and airhead occupations ever. So perhaps future plans might be better predicated on the advice of your accountant. Just saying…]

 

Happy New Year. And, of course,

 

More soon….

 

~kc