Original art courtesy of Ruth E. and digital work by Fluid Production Ltd.

My husband and I started a podcast a just over a week ago.  Two episodes are published as of yesterday. You can find us on iTunes as 23 and 1/2 Miles or on pod bean and here at on 23andahalfmiles.wordpress.com. On the podcast we talk about “life, relationships and the funny people we meet”. My husband decided that since I took his name in marriage, that he would take my name in creative pursuits. He elected to podcast under the name Knyght Darren, as he is my dark night/knight. The entire convulsion probably pleases him more than it should.

In our first episode we talk about why we’re podcasting, and what we intend to talk about in the future, as well as more about ourselves. It’s funny, light hearted and occasionally serious.

During the second episode we went to work a little more, talking about racism, our own relationship in relationship to that, the news incident Garage magazine and Dasha Zhukova, and whether or not someone should take and advice and why.

We podcast weekly, so look forward to something new every Saturday or Sunday, depending on where you fall around the dateline.

This is a creative learning project I’m very excited to share. Eventually, we will have a place to record that doesn’t have Knyght scrubbing all the audio to get rid of the wind noises from Japanese winters. He did a very good job cleaning it up and cutting out the public service announcement that went off in the middle. Thank goodness! It was an unscheduled one we had no idea was coming.

To clarify, Ciara Darren is my creative penn name that I will be publishing under this year. I’ve already been using it to write  for a while here and there and decided that as part of my branding strategy, to keep my speculative writing and my other writing/professional profiles under two different names, like Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain or Sean Platt/Guy Incognito. It’s not because I don’t want anyone to know who I am. What you read here is as real as it gets. I simply do not want to create any confused expectations. If someone’s reading me because they enjoyed my  international relations commentary they’re not likely to be expecting speculative fiction that will almost certainly have the occasional moment of erotic tension or seriously fantastical elements.

Well, that’s all for now folks. Please, if you enjoy the podcast, leave a review or rating on iTunes and/or drop an email, comment on the site. If you have questions or a topic you want us to tackle, email me at ciaradarren@gmail.com or if you prefer to talk to Knyght, you can write him at fushitaka@gmail.com. He keeps trying to spell his email account on the podcast, but since he took a Japanese name, it comes out sounding like he’s cursing everyone. Which he totally didn’t intend to do. If he’s cursing you on purpose, you’ll know. He doesn’t do it often ^_^.