Sneak peek of new podcasts!

Today, Madison and Ella started their new podcast series, in which they interview children's authors, from the kid's perspective.

Was this their idea? Well, no, not exactly. Just before the Book Festival a few weeks ago, the girls had just "cut their first CD" for their singing duo group that they call "DS2," which also includes interviews with each other. I was talking about that with a few local kids' authors at the dinner following the Festival, and the idea to have them interview authors just sort of sprang to all of our minds at once. I went home and put the question to the girls, and they were very enthusiastic.

So their first author interview was today. It was with Charles Noland (whose real name is Dan Beerse), one of the guys who came up with the idea with me that night. We had to get used to calling him "Mr. Noland." Anyway, Dan was honored to be the first. He came over today and recorded the interview in Madison's office-slash-recording studio (a good microphone hooked up to her computer with WavePad recording. Dan was totally patient and supportive as we all got into a groove of asking questions; he was the perfect First Interviewee. The unedited version is about 20 minutes or so; I anticipate that Madison will put all of the audio chunks together and edit them down to about 10-15 minutes.

During the course of the interview, I remembered that one of Dan's books is called Saving Christmas. So I had Madison do a separate little interview with him at the end, just about that book -- because, 'tis the season, you know, and Dan wants to sell books. And I of course live (at least partly) to promote local children's authors.

This evening, Madison edited that segment down to 3 minutes, added a little intro about her podcast series, and saved it all as an MP3 file.

Here it is. Make sure your speakers are on!

I'll release it officially tomorrow in my e-newsletter.

If anyone has an idea of a good name for a KidsOutAndAbout.com podcast series that is of kids interviewing children's authors, please let me know. I hope to find a good name soon. (It needn't be confined to my kids doing the interviewing, by the way...if you have kids who want to record interviews with kids' authors, do so and send 'em my way!)