Lonely Lion

I’ve been working on a podcast for the past few months. It’s called “Same Title Different Story” and is available at http://sametitledifferentstory.com. This Sunday it’s going to be on “Hello Beautiful,” the Chicago Public Radio arts show. The show is on at 10am, on 91.5 FM. As if that’s not exciting enough, Justin Kaufmann (of Chicago’s Schadenfruede) is the host, and Art Shay is a guest. The Art Shay bit is my favorite part, as his photographs of Nelson Algren, one of my favorite writers, have always defined to me who Algren was outside of his writing. One picture in particular, of Algren playing poker in a smoky back room, is on my mental list of greatest pictures of all time. It was gigantic in my mind when I moved to Chicago in 2000. Seven years later, having a project of mine on Chicago Public Radio, alongside one of my Chicago heroes, it’s pretty overwhelming.

For those of you outside of WBEZ’s radio range, the show will be posted in podcast form sometime today. The “Hello Beautiful” website is at http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Program_HB.aspx

And here’s the picture I’m talking about, sadly I can only find it as the cover of “Chicago: City on the Make”,

Same Title Different Story just started its second title last week. After a brief flurry of activity, our subscriber base has pretty much plateaued. It isn’t a bad thing necessarily, we have a good number of fans who clearly like the show. I’ve gotten good feedback, and the authors are happy. That said, I’d like to get the word out, and get things on the upswing again. If anyone out there has any suggestions for promotion, I’m all ears.

Also…reader…tell your friends about this podcast. It’s good.

Chicagoist ran a story today.

Did I mention that this is a Django powered site? I should put a badge up.

Steev had me on as a guest last night to promote Same Title Different Story.

Same Title Different Story got pretty popular yesterday. Nothing extraordinary, but I saw some slow downs. I turned on filesystem caching this morning. So far, anecdotally speaking, the site feels faster. It may very well be washed-car syndrome (when you wash you car, it feels faster).

Regardless, it was an easy process and I’m glad its available. Another ++ for Django.

I’ve been working on a podcast the past few weeks. It’s officially online now at Same Title Different Story.

The premise is pretty simple, I gave a title to a story to a group of friends, and asked them to write the story that goes with the title. Then I recorded them reading their story. I have 13 stories recorded with two different titles. The first two stories just went online, they’re from Miss Alex White and Molly Hale. I’ll be releasing more episodes over the next few weeks. They’re all really good stories, I’m excited to get them out to the world.