Announcing a new podcast: A Good Story Well Told, with Jonathan Auxier!

Hi everybody!

So I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that James Kennedy and I have decided to shutter the Secrets of Story Podcast for the foreseeable future. As you may have noticed, we only did two episodes in the last year, and now things have sputtered to an end, partly because James is so busy with all his exciting writerly endeavors.

So does that mean less content for you? It does not!

You may remember that our most frequent guest on The Secrets of Story Podcast was acclaimed children’s author Jonathan Auxier. Well I overheard Jonathan on a Zoom call with my wife lamenting that he’d like to do a podcast but it was too late to hop on board that train. I gave him a call and said, “Not so fast! I need a new podcast partner!”

Instead of continuing Secrets of Story, we decided to start a new podcast called “A Good Story Well Told”. This will be similar to The Secrets of Story, and everyone who enjoyed that one will enjoy this one too, but there will be changes. The biggest change is frequency. For each season, we’re going to put out a new episode every two weeks no matter what!

The great news is that two episodes are available to listen to right now! The first is an intro episode where we talk about how we met and what we’ll be doing on the podcast. The second is the first episode in our “Shame Shelf” series about what you can learn about writing from the book (and terrible movie) The Giver.

(I’ll be cross-posting the first episode to the Secrets of Story feed, so all 1000 followers or so know about the new show. To hear the second episode and follow along for the whole first season, you’ll have to find and subscribe to the new podcast feed “A Good Story Well Told” on your podcatcher of choice. So please, go right now and subscribe to “A Good Story Well Told” so that you won’t miss the avalanche of new content you’ll have thundering your way!)

Okay, so here’s the first two episodes of the new podcast!

Episode 1 on Apple Podcasts!

Episode 2 on Apple Podcasts!

Or, if you prefer Spotify:

Episode 1 on Spotify!

Episode 2 on Spotify!

Shakespeare, New Sidebar Items, and My Own Personal NaNoWriMo

Well, folks, we have 7 Shakespeare plays left. They are:

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Coriolanus
• The Life and Death of King John
• Pericles
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love’s Labours Lost
• Titus Andronicus

As you may have noticed, one of these things is not like the others. You have the legendary Much Ado and six of his most forgotten plays. The production history here, in case you hadn’t guessed, is that they let directors pick their Shakespeare plays and these are the ones nobody picked (with the big exception of Much Ado which was supposed to be done earlier but kept getting cancelled and pushed back for various reasons.) Are the six I haven’t seen all duds? I hope not. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some I was unfamiliar with as we’ve gone through these, and I’m hoping that will happen again here.

But I’m intimidated to continue, and, more importantly, I need to rewrite my novel, so I’m turning April into my own personal National Novel Writing Month (which is usually held in November.) I’ve got thirty chapters, there are thirty days in April and I’m going to rewrite a chapter a day.

I also have big news announcing new material coming up but I’m not quite ready to announce that yet.

Meanwhile, if you’re starved for content in April, you’ll note that I’ve been doing what you should be doing, exploring the 15 years of archives of this blog, and I’ve discovered some posts that never ended up in the sidebar. Check them out in the bottom of the sidebar over there, or just click on them here:

• How to Write a Memoir (I had forgotten I’d had a series with this title. My novel is semi-autobiographical, so I’ve been studying memoirs intensely for a year, so I should expand this series with what I’ve learned.)
• Have at Least Six Big Decisions (One question I wish I could go back and add to the checklist)
• Can a Computer Do My Job?
• Secrets of Dungeon-Mastering
• My Top 20 Films! (Or at least what they were 15 years ago, the list would be different today. I was really into Tales of Manhattan at the time!)