As some of you might know from the sort of craft books I sometimes review, I'm a knitter and longtime crafter, and I'm always looking for something to do while knitting to maximize the effective use of my time. Sometimes this takes the form of visual entertainment like television and movies, but as a huge reader, I also occasionally want something to satisfy my reading fix. For awhile I listened to audiobooks, but most readings even of relatively short novels can translate to many more hours than I'd have spent on silent reading. Audiobooks also don't give you as much of an opportunity to pause and switch to something else without sacrificing a break in the story. Enter short fiction. I'd been told more than once about Escape Pod, an audio podcast market a member of my writing group had garnered successful sales from.

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(The member is Pete Butler of WorD, whose stories Squonk the Dragon, Squonk the Apprentice, and Lust for Learning are all available as past podcasts, and well worth listening to.) Until recently, I hadn't had the time to sit down and check it out.

I don't know what reminded me of it earlier this month, but over the past couple of weeks, my boyfriend and I have been listening to several stories a day, and I've quickly become a shortform audio addict. The stories all fit my particular genre cravings, and are the perfect thing to have on while he codes, and I knit. The length of the pieces, between twenty minutes and an hour, spare me the time commitment of an entire novel-length audio, and expose me to short fiction I probably wouldn't normally otherwise read, since I don't subscribe to the genre magazines in which many of these stories originate. I already prefer some stories and readers to others, so if you're coming to the podcast as a new listener, here are a few of my favorites so far, all of which happen to deal with technology and consumerism:

Authorwerx by Greg van Eekhout