This podcast was recorded nearly a year ago and it comes to you in two parts. The first part as listened to here is a conversation between Bleak House Books' Alison and crime writing sensation Marcus Sakey.

No effort has been made to remove dated references (see if you can catch the part about "telegraph machines" and the "emerging threat of the French aristocracy"). So, put on your favorite listening device and join us as we hearken back to the days of yore (sometime in September of 2008).

The second half of this interview, the Bonus Content~! if you will, comes in the form of a separate podcast wherein Alison and Marcus discuss Battlestar Galactica. It contains spoilers and academic deconstruction of character and plot. It will raise its mammoth presence shortly.

It's been quite some time, but we're back with another podcast. Slight recap of 2008 and a slighter teaser of what's coming up in 2009.

We hope you are all doing well.

We're joined on today's edition of The Future is Bleak by Nathan Bransford, a literary agent with Curtis Brown Ltd.

Topics covered:
The challenges of being an agent
The joy of words
The Amazon Kindle
Writers on the web

If, after listening, you want to know about Mr. Bransford, you can visit his website here.

To watch the Bleak House Books team talk about the publishing industry on Youtube, go to one of these two choices:

Benjamin LeRoy, Publisher

or

Alison Janssen, Senior Editor

We sat down with Lee Lofland, author of the book Police Procedure and Investigation: A Guide for Writers  to get insight about his time in law enforcement and the writing world.

Lee Lofland is a veteran police investigator who began his law-enforcement career working as an officer in Virginia's prison system. He later became a sheriff's deputy, a patrol officer, and finally, he achieved the highly-prized gold shield of detective. Along the way, he gained a breadth of experience that's unusual to find in the career of a single officer.

This September marks the three year anniversary of Bleak House Books being acquired by Big Earth Publishing. We reflect on how much has changed, how much has stayed the same, and how things were in the distant past.

And for those of you who want to know more about Bleak House Books Senior Editor, Alison Janssen, we've got nearly a half hour's worth of question and answer.

Enjoy!

It's the second edition of Rollin' with Narco Polo as Bleak House Books' podcasting intern, Narco Polo, interviews another author. This week it's Cameron Rogers, author of The Music of Razors.

In nineteenth-century Boston, a young doctor on the run from the law falls in with a British confidence artist. Together–and with dire consequences–they bring back to the light something meant to be forgotten.

A world away in London, an absent father, haunted by the voice of a banished angel, presents his daughter with an impossible friend–a clockwork ballerina.

For two centuries, a bullet-removal specialist has wielded instruments of angel bone in service to a forgotten power . . . and now he vows to find someone else to shoulder the burden, someone with a conscience of their own, a strong mind, and a broken will. For a hundred years he has searched for the perfect contender, and now he has found two: a brother and a sister. Walter and Hope. Either will do.

Last night something stepped from little Walter’s closet and he never woke up. Now he travels the dark road between worlds, no longer entirely boy nor wholly beast, but with one goal in mind: to prevent his sister from suffering the same fate as he. Only the creature he has become can save Hope. But is it too late to save himself?

For more on Cameron, visit his website at www.cameron-rogers.com

With Deputy Sheriff Editor Alison out of the office and celebrating at Thrillerfest, Ben is left to his own devices. Thankfully, the delightful Eric Stone was able to stop by the palatial Bleak House manor to update people on his new novel Flight of the Hornbill and how traveling the world has influenced his writing.

www.ericstone.com

Summer intern Narco Polo interviews Australian author Will Elliott about his novel The Pilo Family Circus. This is the first installment of Rollin' With Narco Polo. We hope you enjoy.

This week we'll be introducing a new segment on select episodes of The Future is Bleak. Summer intern and inquisitive reader Narco Polo will be interviewing authors from all over the publishing world. So that you can better understand her line of questioning, we've decided to give her a ten minute introductory podcast. Here then, is that podcast.

Enjoy.

Alison is back from Deutschland and the podcast resurgence continues at full speed.