Category Archives: Clarion West

This post has been updated because Tina showed up in the comments! If you’ve already read it, I’m not sure how you will know this but read it again.

I have been meaning to write this post since my trip to California way back in March.

I think I’ve explained that while I like the idea of podcasts, I very rarely have time where I just want to sit and listen to things. I only drive about 50 miles a week which isn’t enough time in the car and when I’m on the bus, I usually read. For years I subscribed to EscapePod because I thought I’d eventually get into the habit of listening more.

Instead, I would log in a couple of times a year and pick a couple stories that I wanted to hear and delete the rest. I recently gave it up all together because even when I do get around to listening I rarely enjoy the stories enough that I wanted to keep up with this exercise.

Meanwhile, when I got my iPhone I started subscribing to Toasted Cake which is narrated by Tina Connolly. When I went to California in March, I listened to about 10 of them on the drive. These work for me because they are short, maybe 10-15 minutes, and I almost always like the stories.

I also love Tina’s narration. She recommends books or talks about what’s going on with her. I swear I wrote myself a note so I could link to the exact podcast but I couldn’t find it and I didn’t want to bug Tina because she’s having a baby any minute, not to mention she has a book that came out TODAY, and I didn’t want to be all, “Oh hey, can you remember some random podcast you did where you talked about precious cookware?”

It is Toasted Cake #74 Taking Care of Ma by Lee Hallison and it’s from June which means I’m mistaken about when I listened to it, but who cares? Tina talks about having a hand thrown mini-pie plate perfect for making a fruit crisp. The entire podcast is less than 10 minutes. The story is good and the fruit crisp recipe is a keeper, too.

Upon hearing Tina talk about her special pie plate I thought: I have got to tell the world about my dual pie plate that Kira gave me. You can use it to make two kinds of pie at the same time.

And while I’m here, let me pimp Tina’s new book, Copperhead that came out today. The timing of this post is a coincidence. Yesterday I realized I had that photo of my pie plate sitting on my desktop forever and it was time to do something about it. Here’s an interview where Tina talks about the book.

Meanwhile, in addition to Toasted Cake I did a bunch of searching and loaded a whole variety of podcasts onto my phone to listen to on the trip I took this month. I had an interview with Joss Whedon and an interview with George Saunders. I had a WGA panel on the best written tv shows. I had all kinds of stuff.

It worked great on the trip down except I didn’t know I had to do something to get them to play one after the other so I kept having to fiddle with my phone to get to the next podcast while I was driving. I know, safe.

I still have about 500 pages of tutorials relating to technology that I’m very sincerely trying to get to but then, I’ve got a lot of things I’m trying to get to. The minute I finish this I’m running to the backyard to do about 4 days worth of gardening in 2 hours.

When I got to Orleans, I plugged my phone into my laptop, thinking I’d delete what I already listened to and then set up a playlist with the podcasts I had left.

And my laptop was kind enough to sync up my phone with the podcasts on the laptop which were the 30 Escapepod stories that I decided I didn’t want to listen to and a bunch of Toasted Cakes I already listened to. All my cool interviews went away. I don’t have my laptop and desktop systems synced right now because I haven’t gotten to that tutorial yet. However, one of the stories was Flowing Shapes by my Clarion West classmate Rajan Khanna who just sold his first novel.

So it all worked out.