I'm sure many of us have some awareness about podcast novels, and authors who've gained some notoriety for their publishing thereforth.
But.
Some of the authors who've gained popularity in such a manner, to my mind, well.. the writing is actually pretty poor.
There's.. something of a stigma about saying anything naysaying these works. It's.. "anti-community." Or something. But still. No. If the writing is poor, IMHO, you've got to call people on it.. should'nt you?
Anyone who's spent much time bouncing from message board to message board as I have would know what I mean. There's a lot of, hmm whats the word, self-love amongst the podcast fiction community, and to a degree, its really detrimental.
You need a little objectivity or it all just seems self-serving.
I guess I'm just curious if anyone else has noticed this trend, and what they think about it.
This is a very interesting point and one I've been chewing over since I read the start of the thread a couple of days ago. It's a really odd one because personal taste is the living definition of Your Mileage May Vary and that simple fact, that differentiation, the fact that different people see different thing sin the same piece of culture fascinates me.
Give you an example, I've watched Criminal Minds since it started. It's a good show, fiercely talented central cast, interestingly grim world view, deals with it's female characters pretty well. I like it. I don't like it to the same level I like Supernatural, Northern Exposure, Due South, Doctor Who, Ashes to Ashes etc but I like it a fair bit.
Go talk to Elizabeth Bear about Criminal Minds and it opens like a flower. She sees countless piece of character background shown through implication, fascinating echoes back to previous episodes, constant parity between the character and the serial killers they chase and a constant, unflinching exploration of why these five people are uniquely broken and uniquely suited to work with exactly no one but them.
Same show, different eyes. I think the same thing could be applied to any media including podcasting. There are podcasts I've turned off halfway through the first episode (And of course out there, someone will read this and go 'Yeah and some of them featured you, BUDDY!'), there are podcast novels I've skipped sections of, groaned at sections of or just given up on. For me, they didn't work. For other people they will and do.
Which is pretty awesome actually:) I love that almost any piece of pop culture is a lament configuration of meaning, that you can constantly find new things in it. But of course, that's only really half the point. As to why everything gets, or got, recommended to everyone all the time? I think there's a reason and a solution to that:
This is a new medium, a new way to communicate any and everything from your own fiction to the news. It's the wild west, a frontier that that four years ago was still full of sand and dust and endless horizons. Now it's a lot more settled but the culture of the first people through the gate, the willingness to look after the people around them, to build them up simply for being brave enough or positioned enough to try it, is still there. It's fading now (I seem to remember a while back someone complained that every podcast I mentioned in the pseudopod intros was fantastic. I now moderate my language a bit more) but it's still evident.
As to how to deal with it? I'm tending more and more to stick to the rule I used when I ran the comic store; be positive about stuff you're positive about. There are so many podcasts, so many voices out there that it's actually beholden on anyone sitting in front of a mic to point out the stuff they like rather than down the stuff they don't. Like I say there's plenty of stuff I really don't get on with but in the end, there's more that I do.
So that was massively rambly. Sorry about that:)