Yesterday I posted the podcasts from the September meeting of BristolCon Fringe, the monthly readings series that I help host. I’m not actually as late as it seems with these, because we took a month off in October due to the convention and Festival of Literature. Still, they are now up and worth a listen.

We started with Piotr Åšwietlik who is from Poland and is one of those clever people who can write fiction in two languages. Apologies to Piotr for the sound quality. We were hoping to feed the sound direct from the amp into the recorder, but we hadn’t had a chance to test that and this caused a bunch of problems.

Thankfully things were better for Tim Maughan, though there is still a lot of background noise. Tim has been doing Eeyore impressions on Twitter about his performance, but I have heard worse, and I always cringe listening to my performances too. The final 12 minutes or so is given over to reading the whole of Tim’s latest story, “Zero Hours”, which caused such a big splash online when it came out.

Finally we did some Q&A. I asked Piotr about differences between English and Polish, and about the SF&F scene in Poland. I note that Andrzej Sapkowski is one of the Guests of Honour at next year’s Eurocon. I’ve met him before. He’s very personable, though my Irish friends should make sure that they are well stocked with whisky beforehand. Tim talked about the influence of hip-hop on his writing, and gave us an exclusive about the novel he is working on.

The November Fringe meeting is next Monday (18th) when our guests will be Jonathan L. Howard and Ian Millsted.