Geek
/ɡēk/

noun

1. a person who has excessive enthusiasm for and some expertise about a specialized subject or activity.
   a foreign-film geek

verb

1. engage in or discuss engineering details obsessively or with great attention to technical detail.
   “We all geeked out on Star Wars for a bit.”

 

The first “Epic Geeking Out with Authors of steampunk, fantasy, and science-fiction” talk show / vlog / podcast was really fun. We all had a good time. Being the very first one, it was rough around the edges. The show’s format is a work-in-progress; we’ll continue to polish it and adjust, making it the best we can for you.

I spent a lot of time deciding if I wanted to do a podcast or not. Many people I know kept pushing me to start one, but I kept asking myself what could I add to improve the already available podcasts. Do we really need another author interview podcast style show, or a “how to be a better author” show? Probably not, if so, I’m sure someone else could do a LOT better than me at this. If I was going to do a podcast I wanted it to be: fun for the audience (naturally), fun for me (aka something I’d like to listen to and do), not too time consuming (need to not take away from writing new stuff), and truly unique (this is the killer item).

I’ve gotten to know a lot of really amazing authors since my books have been published. I’ve gotten the privilege to be on a number of radio shows, podcasts, and in a few cases, I got to be a co-host. In all this, I’ve been happy to discover that other authors, like me, LOVE geeking out with others over their favorite genres . Even more, they always want to geek out about their own books and stories. Readers love doing this all the time.

I’ve always had to be really careful about trying to ask people about my books. I wasn’t really surprised to find that my author friends all feel the same. When authors do a podcast, radio, or other media interview there is this time before, and often after, the interview, where participants have an informal open chat. Those “off the air” chats are usually more fun than the actual interview. The discussion isn’t scripted or constrained by the topic of the show or the fact that what is being said will go public. In other words, the authors and hosts have an amazingly fun chat roaming across all topics including insider or behind-the-scenes details of the books or details on the show. These pre and post show conversations naturally roam around for a bit as everyone “gets to know” or “catches up with” each other.

And voila. There is the niche for a new show, a real honest-to-goodness geeking out on books show. Except instead of “talking about some author’s work” we will be “talking to THE Author about THEIR work.” Epic Geeking Out is entirely about having unscripted, non-constrained talks where the guest authors finally get to geek out with others over their favorite hidden details of their books. These conversations are live, will only be edited to add the podcast intro and exit titles along with audio quality fixes. The guests are asked to keep the language “generally clean,” but that doesn’t mean an occasional curse word won’t make it in. We won’t be editing them out or bleeping them if they do.

So, Epic Geeking Out with Authors is a live recorded, Blab.im show which will be then be sound edited and posted as a video blog on YouTube.com and as a Podcast. The show will be entirely the on-the-air broadcast of what normally would be edited out of interviews. Here, we can simply “geek out” with authors about their own works, no shame, not really, about promotion, just geeking out over some of the more interesting elements. Yes, this means ripping the covers off the books and showing off spoilers, strange tidbits, etc. Again, every single show has a 99.9% chance of having spoilers. You have been warned.

This is going to be a ton of fun for everyone. Audience readers will be able to ask questions, and we’ll cherry pick the ones we want to delve into. Authors coming on the show will identify “what they really want to talk about but don’t because they’ve tried to keep the cat in the bag” and ask their fans for questions “they’d like answered” regardless of how much that would kill the story for someone who hasn’t read it yet. You can either show up for the live show and post questions there, or before each show, there will be a post on the Show’s Facebook page (sorry that is the only medium we’ll use for this, I did say I was keeping this simple and easy). Questions posted to the show can be voted on (by thumbs up), and we’ll try to get to the majority of the most popular questions.

Questions and places we’ll be going are topics like:

• Asking “Man, that ring moment in Sixth Sense was really awesome. Was the show planned that way, or did someone suggest ‘hey what if the lead was a ghost too?’ Where did that come from! How hard was it to pull off?”
• Or just the author saying, “Oh man ya, when I decided Darth Vader was going to be Luke’s father I totally got chills. Of course I had to go back and work in some foreshadowing. Still a lot of people missed the clues.” — “Really like what?” — “Well, my favorites are…”

You can chat about previous shows, ask questions for upcoming shows, suggest authors, and connect with listeners and the hosts on Facebook at https://facebook.com/EpicGeekingOut

The show’s schedule / calendar can be found on the VIEW ONLY Google spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YtHnWHVmLI8VLkH2O3kggVfcIlf0aEbFRiVc7OdeIEI/edit?usp=sharing

The show has a web page where you can find links to previous episodes at http://epicgeekingout.com/

If you’re a:

• Steampunk/Fantasy/Sci-Fi author and want to be on the show; or
• fan who sweet talks their favorite author to come on (yes if you beg them you get to grill them too!); or
• serious fan of an author who is coming on, and we still have the guest co-host slot open

Just let me know.

You can find the show links and details at: http://epicgeekingout.com/