A kickstarter and a podcast

A couple of signal-boost items, for your edification, delectation, et cetera:

The Dynamic Duo of Dan Rabarts and Grant Stone, currently shortlisted for this year’s Sir Julius Vogel Awards in the Best Short Story Category, provide a double-header podcast featuring both those stories–the eerie ‘Paint By Numbers‘ and the sublime ‘Better Phones‘–on the latest StarShipSofa podcast. (As I’ve mentioned previously, you can already read these stories for free–for now–in e-book form, available through the ASIM website, but the podcast is obviously ideal for anyone who can’t be bothered with all that tedious screen-to-eyeball-to-brain stuff. So give it a listen! Revel in the Kiwi accents! Effortlessly absorb all that storytelling goodness! Your brain will thank you for it!)

And Ghost Hold, the sequel to Ripley Patton‘s all-kinds-of-awesome debut YA novel Ghost Hand, is currently the subject of a kickstarter campaign, as Ripley seeks to raise the necessaries to publish it. The campaign is closing on the halfway mark, in terms of both time and funding. Ripley has offered a variety of appetising rewards, such as signed copies, e-books, postcards etc., for those willing to act as Ghost Hold benefactors. And I must confess a vested interest in seeing the campaign reach its goal (aside from the facts that Ghost Hand was a really cool book, and that Ripley is a very talented writer who deserves to have her stories told)–I’ll be helping to bring the book into existence, by doing the layout on the manuscript. So it’s a double-header, in a sense: not only will your generosity help in producing a terrific sequel to a brilliant debut, it’ll also save me from the unenviable task of twiddling my thumbs at some point over the next few months.