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Hello and welcome to Astronomycast live from Balthacan. I am Dr. Pamela Gay and with me this week not as always, I have a special guest.

I have author P.G. Holyfield who has done a whole variety of different projects in exploring all the different parts of new media and talking literature and space and science and driving other people to write and can you tell our audience a little bit about some of your different projects?

Sure, thank you. I'm mainly known for a podcast novel that I did Murder and Evident Hill that was later picked up by a publisher.

I've done short story anthology through that website. Over the last three or four years I've been working on SpecificMedia.com. We have a couple podcasts there currently one being Beyond the Wall which is a Game of Thrones podcast.

We have a live show here tomorrow night at 9pm if you're interested in that. I've also done a couple of different nano-rhymo inspired podcasts. The last one Pamela helped out with which was called Living Nano-Rymo where we did Google Hangouts and I don't even know if we're doing Hangouts or just something.

You're doing Google Hangouts which end up being a YouTube show where we were attempting to succeed at nano-rhymo which is a national novel writing month for those that may not know that and just sort of following our progress and talking about writing and the real life things that come and get in our way when we attempt to write.

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I know PG from the early days of podcasting when we were all figuring out this strange new technology and he was part of Padiobook's Backband which came from Eva Terra and Chris Miller.

As all of us have grown up in this community coming to cons, getting to know each other, transitioning to Google Hangouts, one of the things that I've loved as a scientist is I occasionally get invited to attempt to write fiction.

But much more often I get asked all sorts of is this legit how can I do this can you help me figure this out I need an idea to do food and I know you periodically come to me into noisy astronomer Nicole Glucci and as an author what's the process like to realize writing writing writing need plot device to the science by scientists what goes through your head in a more complicated form.

That's that pretty much not I don't get much more complicated than that I like writing sort of mixing genres so my first novel was basically a murder mystery but set in a fantasy world so it had all the trappings of just a medieval murder mystery but you know had magic and monsters and gods and that sort of thing as well.

So I had an idea or the main example of working with you is a couple years ago I had an idea of doing sort of a murder mystery but in on a spaceship and so while the science wasn't the primary you know wasn't hard sci-fi in the respect of this is you know about the center of this is about space travel.

I needed to have the mechanisms I wanted to have the mechanisms be valid of you know the things that are going on story why they're traveling how they're traveling and so I you know contacted Pamela and I said can we can we work on this you know can I ask you questions can I always receptive on that and we work together on that.

That was one of my nanorama projects and it was you know I haven't finished the book yet it was always successful as far as trying to figure things out and work with you.

As an author how do you decide it's time for me to ask questions versus it's time for me to read Wikipedia.

Actually it's the other way around it's it's I find that I dive down this whole of Wikipedia or whatever trying to find the science and I spend 10 times as much time doing resource and actually writing.

And so you take sort of the to pronged approach of insert placeholder here to explain the the the propulsion engines that's going to get you know the spaceship's going rather than doing research of what might happen in the next 50 years when it comes to this sort of thing and then.

The other prong of that being okay stop stop just looking at these pages and and call Pamela ask for options and go from there so.

And what one of the reasons I wouldn't have pg on is one of the great things that we've got to do with all of our projects is is work with all these diverse talents and sometimes we find really neat side things to do so a couple of years ago we did a crowdsourced comic book handi and.

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