Writing clinic audio

[altivo]

First, happy card-companies-confectioners-and-florists-get-rich day to all of you. Or, as someone pointed out, tomorrow is cheap-chocolate-on-sale day.

Last week, noted and notorious publisher Alex F. Vance issued an invitation for furry writers to participate in an online clinic to be held over Ustream on Saturday evening (or early Sunday morning for the European folks.) I submitted a page of dialog as candidate material and he accepted it.

In all, seven writers had samples of their work read and discussed over a three hour period. Participants included Alex, Skip Ruddertail, Tango-Mutt, Buck Hopper, PS Lion, Cybercoyote, Sulartenem, and Siphedious as well as myself. The entire session ran three hours and was both interesting and entertaining. Alex edited the audio track and has posted it in several segments here.

We were scattered across the face of the earth from Indonesia and Australia to Europe to both coasts of North America, but thanks to Skype and Ustream Alex was able to pull it all together so everyone could have a say and hear what the others thought. It was great fun, and I recommend the audio tracks to anyone interested in furry writing, or just writing in general.

Comments

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I've heard from you and another friend now about using Skype — not that I'd never heard of it before, but these are the most I've heard of practical applications I could see using. I might try installing it sometime. I have to shuffle some files off my hard disc first, but it could be a nice tool.

Glad to hear you had a good time with this session. Sounded as if it could be worthwhile when you and Alex first mentioned it, and it seems that it panned out.

[altivo]

I've resisted Skype for a long time, but I went ahead and installed it specifically for this event. It worked, once I got it mapped to the correct input and output devices. It's not as bad on bandwidth as, say, creating a live video feed would be, but I don't imagine it would work very well over dialup either. The user interface is simple to the point of forcing you to hunt for hardware settings that might be critical (as they were in my case.)

The download was 28 MB for Linux, and the installed software takes up about 48 MB on disk. This still seems horrifying to me because I remember when a 5 MB hard disk was normal, and even the drives on an IBM mainframe were only 500 MB or less, but that's me. In the realm of today's bloated applications, it's probably smaller than average. Or, to put it another way, bigger than Firefox, smaller than OpenOffice.

[hrrunka]

tomorrow is cheap-chocolate-on-sale day

Heh! That works for me. :)

[altivo]

Or (someone suggested) Lupercalia. Trust the Romans to put their holiday on a date when everything goes on sale.