I like my new writing group, but there isn’t really a lot to say about it. I got a chance to beta-read for one of the authors this week, which was a good experience (the writing was good – thank goodness! – and I made a few suggestions, but there is always that slight nervousness when you provide feedback to someone for the first time. Will they find it valuable? Will I be dead to them from now on because of a poorly worded critique? Who knows, or dares to dream).<\/p>\n
With less commuting time, I find myself listening to less podcasts these days. It is interesting to see which ones survive the war of attrition. The Coode St Podcast<\/em> remains on the list, as does Galactic Suburbia<\/em>, The Writer and the Critic<\/em> and Tea and Jeopardy<\/em>. New comer\u00a0Sheep Might Fly<\/em>\u00a0has managed to worm its way in there. I’ve also got quite a back catalogue of\u00a0Writing Excuses<\/em> to catch up on, which I find a useful way of getting me into a writing mood. Because I create the eBooks for the Antipodean SF<\/em> web-magazine, I tend to read the fiction that way, so haven’t kept up with the Anti-SF podcast.<\/p>\n I haven’t updated my Podcast page<\/a> on the website for a while – perhaps I should add that to my to do list.<\/p>\n I don’t think I’ve mentioned before that the fantastic\u00a0Rivqa Rafael won the Best New Talent Ditmar this year. I met Rivqa at GenreCon last year, and she was the one who was kind enough to invite me to pop along to her writing group, which I’ve enjoyed. It was an enormously well deserved award.<\/p>\n Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure there is something else interesting to say, but I cannot bludgeon it out of the slightly headache-y brain. That will have to do for this week, Internet. Rest assured, I feel that I owe you a significantly improved post for next week. I shall begin work on it at once (*<\/strong>).<\/p>\n (*<\/strong>) that is, technically, a lie. OK, it may actually move the dial from “technical lie” to “outright fabrication”. But there is at least a 34% chance that I will start work on next week’s post earlier than late Sunday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n <\/p>Hi,\n Welcome to Mark Webb’s author website. At this point the site is rather sparse – I’ve only recently started writing and there isn’t a lot to show for it right now. You can check out\u00a0my biography<\/a>, see …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[201,180,15],"class_list":["post-2894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","tag-musings","tag-rivqa-rafael","tag-specfic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2894"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2899,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894\/revisions\/2899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}