New Podcast Premiere - AE Reads Skiffily

Welcome everyone to the first episode of AE Reads Skiffily, a new podcast featuring me, AE. The core of this new science fiction podcast is my desire to share engaging speculative fiction and see new worlds jump out of the page onto other media. Each podcast episode will feature me reading excerpts from science fiction books, magazines, blogs, or wherever else science fiction is published. I assure you that the speculative fiction will be the kind that taps into your imagination and takes you to new and intriguing places.

What I ask of you, my budding audience, is to listen to each episode as a call to action. If you are an artist, I want you to translate what you hear (and read, since I'll be providing links to the content I read whenever I can). I envision AE Reads Skiffily to grow into a large collaborative project involving numerous painters, drawers, moviemakers, actors, seamstresses, t-shirt designers, photoshoppers, and sculptors. I see this science fiction podcast as a way for people to blow each other's minds and it starts today. If you aren't an artist yourself, but you like where this could go, share the podcast with your artsy friends.

For our first episode of AE Reads Skiffily, I share an except from Dale Bailey's "Teenagers from Outer Space,"which first appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine this last August. The excerpt depicts Nancy Miller's (the narrator) visit to Bug Town, an alien enclave that popped up in Milledgeville, Ohio (a real place) in the early 1950s. Nancy's best friend Joan Hayden has run away to Bug Town to escape her overbearing father. Joan's ex-boyfriend Johnny Fabriano wants to take Joan from Tham (the alien's name is actually Sam, but the aliens have a lisp and Nancy is quite the irreverent narrator) for stealing his girlfriend and ruining the top of his Mercedes Coupé. I chose this story and this excerpt because Bug Town sounds so evocative. The alien ghetto sounds both enticing and dangerous, like a dangerous narcotic or really good cheese dip.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the play button below. 

If you are having trouble with the embedded player and/or want to download the episode for later and listen to me read science fiction while you're in your car or at the gym, click here. I should warn you that, if there are children nearby, I do say a four-letter word that rhymes with "schmuck."
Thank you for listening to my podcast. Please feel free to leave a comment, whether to give your thoughts on the story or to share a link to your art posted on a free image-hosting site like Imgur As I develop the podcast and my listener base, I will be modifying this paragraph to reflect changes in how podcast art is submitted and shared. For the time being, you can either email me (my email is mentioned in my podcast and also in the image above. I won't list it explicitly yet to avoid spammers, but if you have difficulty with either the audio or the image, you can always message me on Facebook). Happy listening and always keep reading!

Update: Since first releasing this blog post, I have started using Podomatic as a hosting site and have modified the download/listen link. You can also find AE Reads Skiffily on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts.