Thursday, October 31, 2013

Bonus Halloween Podcast

Rachel and I decided to do a bonus Halloween podcast (very short, only about 10 minutes) in which we listen to some more poetry in ancient Sumerian and talk to Professor Dalglesh about the first author (do you know who that was?  Hint: it was a woman!) and general language things...

The podcast is embedded in the blog post, and you can follow the links inside to get a more in-depth picture of the things we discussed.  http://entertheunseen.com/notes-halloween-travels/

Also, as Dylan, I wrote a short story for the Unseen World:  http://entertheunseen.com/portfolio-item/read-frayed-edges/

Fans of my urban fantasy work should enjoy "Frayed Edges," it's very much like a Garnet novel or maybe even Precinct 13. 

Happy Halloween!


Happy Halloween!  My family and I always love carving pumpkins, and this was my scary guy.  I based him partly on my Anime crush, Renji Abarai (the funky eyebrow things are his.)

Mason, my son, came up with this design, which I think looks like an homage to Grumpy Cat/Tard:



Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Podcast

I'm doing a podcast (under the stage name "Dylan Calish), which I hope will become a monthly thing.  It's called "Travels in the UnSeen World" and you can take a listen to the first episode here:  http://entertheunseen.com/travels1/

Here's how it's described:

Who wouldn’t want to learn to say “devour the corpses like a dog; so say well all” in the phonetic interpretation of Cuneiform?

In our very first podcast of “Travels in the UnSeen World” you can learn that phrase as well as several other evocations to the god Inanna as read to us by Professor Cass Dalglish. We will also learn about the five types of demons that inhabit the UnSeen World from author Rachel Calish… in an interview that was crashed (almost literally) by several unseen guests….

So, grab your passports, fellow travelers, and get ready to enter the UnSeen….

Sounds cool, right?  Well, feel free to check it out.  It's a project that I've had in mind for a long time.  Like any good otaku, I've been trying to teach myself Japanese.  As part of this, I've listened to some VERY boring language tapes.  "John Learner would like a cup of coffee."  And phrases like this where nothing untoward every happens to Mr. Learner. He always gets through customs without a hassle.  Makes a phone call without dialing the wrong number.  And any number of completely unlikely scenarios when you're traveling abroad, right??  And, anyway, I have always thought it'd be so much more fun to learn a language if you were actually following an interesting story.  This isn't quite that, because it's also in support of my friend Rachel's new book and the world she developed around it, but there is a strong language component that's part of this.

Anyway, it's a creative project that's keeping me off the streets.