Audiobook Adventures: "Love . . . Exciting And New"

Cum aboard, we're expecting you.

Guess I'm gonna go ahead and finish this post, since it's been two months since I started it.

A year ago, when I first started trying to do audiobooks, I thought about maybe doing a couple of pieces of Erotica.  It seemed like someone who was a casual reader (or not a reader at all) might enjoy listening to sexual exploits rather than just watching them on the internet, so I figured I'd give it a try.

Oh, maybe we should define Erotica here.  I suppose we're talking about depictions of physical love, instead of just romantic love, flirting, newly-developed feelings, etc..  Porn, I guess.  Just so there's no confusion.

The thing is, porn is, at least to me, a form of fantasy, of male wish fulfillment.  The way a perfect world would work.  Your mileage may vary, of course.

And the Romance genre (at least the traditional, Harlequin-style Romance) is much the same, a form of fantasy, of female wish fulfillment.  The kind of life one dreams of having.

The project I'm currently working on (nearly done, now) is a Romance book, written by a woman, and ostensibly intended for women.  But it's not exactly a paperback with Fabio on the cover.  I think the author would describe it as Erotic Romance, or there may be another, better term for this subgenre.

It has a different feel from the other Romance I've performed in the past year.  And it feels different from Erotica as well.  The writer has at least five of these out there, with handsome, wealthy, clever protagonists* and meet-cute scenarios with women who spread their arms (and legs) for them.

This one is written much like a typical romantic scenario, where a man and a woman meet, feel attraction for one another, get together, then obstacles arise and they go their separate ways, only to come back together at the end.  It shifts between the point of view of the male character and the female one, but it's pretty emotionally exaggerated, and feels like the female POV outweighs the male one.  Which is fine . . .

. . .  except that there is an enormous amount of full-on, descriptive, explicit sex.  Literally the first moment the male and female characters meet (this is in Chapter One, mind you), they create the beast with two backs.  And it's not just a quick paragraph of how "Carly's eyes closed as their bodies became one, the joy of their intimacy filling her from top to bottom.  No more was she a young, innocent girl of forty-three . . . she was now a woman."  It really buries not the lead, giving us a Vivid Entertainment's eye view of every well-lit detail.

Narratively, I would not have imagined a story would work that way.  As author, you'd want to do what you can to keep the couple apart, undermining the audience's expectations but forcing them to keep hoping things will work out, all the while inserting new obstacles so foreign and unnatural, you'd think "Dawson's Creek" went on for eighteen seasons.  But porn has different logic, different rules than regular storytelling, I suppose.

And I don't know if it works or not.  Which is a humble way of saying that it totally doesn't work.  It's so incongruous that it's like one of those movies where somebody has gone in afterwards and added explicit stuff (like HALLOWEEN 2 for gore or CALIGULA for sex), or that story the pastor used to tell about how the sex scene in TOP GUN was such an afterthought that Kelly McGillis's hair isn't even the right color anymore.

There are genuine characters in the book, and interactions that feel pretty real, and some emotion that feels earned.  There is also some silly Hallmark Channel/Lifetime Television For Women And Gay Men melodrama too, but I figured that was par for the course.  When the happy ending comes in the last chapter, I felt pretty good about it, but then there came one more "happy ending" in the massage sense that made me shake my head with discomfort.**

I talked to Big about it, and it was difficult to convey my problem with the narrative without simply spelling out in no uncertain terms what went on in the story's coda.  It made me feel like a prude, one who resorted to spelling certain objectionable words and shuddering after I did it.  And Big could understand reading a book like that himself (with the doors locked and the curtains drawn), but not finding his wife reading.

I really don't know who this kind of book is for, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate it when it works.  The author has made a name for herself writing this sort of thing, and her Amazon pages are overflowing with gushing five-star reviews, written (assumedly) by women who devoured her books and can't wait for the next one.*** 

I'd really like to talk to a woman like this, one who hasn't been beaten down by puritanical society to see intercourse as an evil somehow equal to the taking of human life.  Just to gauge her thoughts on this. 

Most Erotica on Audible is performed by women, and I totally get that.  If I wanted to listen to explicit tale of a girl's first foray into Sapphic Summer Camp, I'd totally want it narrated by a woman.  There are several Gay-themed stories and books looking for narrators every time I look at the list, and those are naturally to be recorded by men. 

I felt a bit awkward during this one, but haven't gotten any complaints from the author.  I was a bit embarrassed to be delivering the lines--and performance, since I'm acting out the female parts as well--but I hope that doesn't show.  It's still good work if you can get it, and I gave it my all nevertheless.

In the meantime, I am happy to spend the money I was paid to narrate this particular book, and I hope several people who are looking for this sort of thing find exactly what they were after in my performance.  If so, maybe I'll get to narrate one or two more of these puzzling tales of Modern Erotic Romance.

Rish Outfield, Smut Reader

*Apparently the wish fulfilment of many, according to user comments.

**I figured when I began this project that I'd have to record the audiobook under a pseudonym, which is sad since I ought to be promoting my work any way I can.  But then there would be a chapter that just felt like a typical book, a book my mom might be reading, and I'd think, "No, this is fine; I'm gonna re-record the intro using my own name."  But then there'd be another three or four page play-by-play of the two lovers gettin' it on, and I'd think, "Oh.  Oh yeah.  Now I remember."

***They can't all be plants, can they?  Not when a hundred illiterate assholes can bash J.K. Rowling's latest book while admitting that they haven't read it themselves, and those reviews don't get taken down.

Ghostbusters . . . Minus One

When I was living in Los Angeles, I was driving home from work one evening when I saw a man walking alone along the sidewalk toward the Fox lot.  As I drove past, I thought, "Hey, I know that guy."  I did a U-turn when I could, then slowed as I passed him.  I called out my window, "Mister Ramis, do you need a ride somewhere?"  He smiled and said "No thanks, I'm fine."  And I drove on.

That was my one experience with Harold Ramis, besides the ones everybody else shares.  It occurred to me then, and many times afterward, that if he had agreed to my help (I assumed his car was broken down and he was headed to Century City, though he could well have just been taking a walk*), that would have made for a really cool story.  Eventually, I combined it with an experience I had had earlier with a former "Saturday Night Live" cast member, who was either drunk or tripping out, and wrote it into a story I believe I called "Hero Worship," about a kid like me who gives his movie idol a drive home.

Harold Ramis died this week.  He was sixty-nine, and though most people know him from playing Doctor Egon Spengler, he did direct GROUNDHOG DAY and ANALYZE THIS and CADDYSHACK and NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION (which surprised the heck out of me).  Even so, when he died, I couldn't help but think of him saying, "I collect spores, mold, and fungus."  Not much of an obituary, I know.

Still, as I get older, it's gonna be more and more likely that the celebrities who die are going to be the ones who were important to me in my formative years.  When I was a kid, the only people who died were old folks and the occasional rock musician.  Now, though, people are dying that don't seem elderly to me, often not much older than I have become. 

I really ought to say something more about Ramis, but now I'm just generally sad.

Actually, I just got something.  Somebody on Facebook today posted a quote from Ramis (he got it from his rabbi, but he was the one who told it in a speech), and I really dug it.  He said, "You should start each day with a note in each pocket.  One note says, 'The world was created just for me' and the other says, 'I'm a speck of dust in a meaningless universe.'  Keep them both, because neither are true and both are true."  Nice.

Rish Outfield

*This is doubtful, though, because as everyone knows, nobody walks in L.A..

Rish's story "The Gold Bug" on the "Journey Into" podcast

Our buddy Marshal Latham has a contest every year on his show, "The Journey Into..." podcast, in honor of Edgar Allan Poe.  The rule of the contest (the only rule, other than length) is that it has to take the title of a Poe story or poem, and has to . . . I don't know, be in his style or milieu.

I considered entering the contest last time, thinking immediately of a time when our family traveled to California, and I saw the same car (with a copy of Hustler magazine in its window) both in Redlands and Santa Monica, California (despite the two cities being two hours distant from one another).  I didn't know what story I could make out of that, except that I could make the car a VW beetle, and call the story "The Gold Bug."

I missed it that year, but went ahead and wrote a story with that title for the next one, and it's available over there in audio form right now.  It tells the tale of an eleven year old boy encountering a mysterious car on a family vacation, and is narrated by Pat Krane of the "That TV Show" and "Convert To Raid" podcasts.

Writing is a funny thing.  As a would-be screenwriter, I often had premises or ideas for fantastic scenes that I knew would work (or make great movies or sequences in them), but the challenge was creating a framework around the scenes, or a narrative from the premise itself.  That is much harder, and most of the time (if I had to guess, I'd say 65% to 75% of the time), I realize that the work it's going to take to make a script out of an idea, or to come up with a series of events leading up to those brilliant scenes would not be worth it, not on spec, anyway.

I still hold to the theory that there is a bang-up story in the car with the dirty magazine in the window, but I'm not sure if "The Gold Bug" is that story.  Regardless, it was one of the winners of the contest (and Marshal swears he did not see the authors' names when he judged it), so it's conceivable that someone out there will like it.  Check it out here: http://www.journeyintopodcast.blogspot.com/2014/02/journey-88-gold-bug-by-rish-outfield.html

Rish Outfield, Goldbugger

Happy(?) Valentine's Day From Fake Sean Connery

On this, the worst day of the year, Sir Fake Sean Connery pays Rish a visit . . . ostensibly to cheer him up.

Rish Outcast 5: All Night Gas

Rish brings his short story "All Night Gas" to somewhat life in this episode.  Afterward, he ruminates on superheroes and saviors, the need for them, the need to be rescued.  Sigh.



Music was "Colorless Aura" and "Return of Lazarus" by Kevin McLeod, courtesy of Incompetech.com.

Right click HERE to download the episode, select Save Link As, and save the file to your hard drive.

Audiobook Adventures: Chapter 35

Well, it has come time to decide whether I want to do more of the Dumarest books or not.  And I can't decide.

A few months back, I spoke to someone who heard from another audiobook producer that they were doing books in this series, and I felt disappointed and a bit betrayed.  But then, the end of 2013 came, and it was really, really hard for me to get the last two books done.  And there were a ton of questionable revisions that came due in the fourth book, which further put me off.*

I missed my deadline on "Kalin" by a week or so, and my deadline on "The Jester At Scar" by three weeks.  Within a couple of days, I got a message regarding the next five books in the series.  I haven't responded yet.

I took on a couple of other projects at the start of the new year.  One of them is a sequel to a book I did when I first started this whole thing, and the author was kind enough to suggest ACX pay me a stipend for this one.  I am excited to start on that one, and I'm sure I can do a better job with Book Two than I did with Book One.**

Before that, though, I have to finish a project I took on, for pay, but with only two weeks before the deadline.  I had very little trouble recording the book (though I was surprised by how long it was, despite the word count), but the editing is slow going.  I know I say it a lot, but wow, the editing on these things is a bear.  I have edited hundreds of Dunesteefs and That Gets My Goats, and almost without exception, those are a pleasure to work on.  But audiobooks are different, and require a higher level of concentration, and another mindset from podcast editing.  It may be that it uses another part of my brain, but it always takes so unaccountably long to do, and almost always puts me to sleep. 

It still beats digging ditches, don't get me wrong.

I think, for my next post, I'll talk a bit about the paid project I just mentioned . . . erotica.

Rish Outfield, Audioboy

*Did I mention that in an earlier post?  There are sometimes typos or word-substitutions in these paperbacks, and I tend to try to fix them if I find them.  But then I was actually asked (only in Book Four) to change them back to the incorrect texts.  Ultimately, I emailed the publisher and asked her advice, and ended up only changing the things that were legitimate mistakes on my part.

**This is simply from doing this for a while, figuring out the best way to record and edit, and the fact that I have a microphone set up that sounds better than the one I did the first book on.  Hopefully, it'll be easier to edit than the last one too . . . since I know there's a paycheck involved.

Philip Seymour Hoffman R.I.P.

So, Philip Seymour Hoffman died today. I haven't seen a great many of his films, but he was pretty beloved in film circles, and he was only forty-six years old, while Vin Diesel will probably live to see his nineties.

Hoffman, a critical darling, won an Oscar for playing Truman Capote, but it was rare for him to play the lead in a film (especially something in the mainstream).

There's an alternate reality out there, where 2008's THE DARK KNIGHT wasn't nearly the hit it was here, but was also merely the second film in Christopher Nolan's five-film series, culminating in 2016's BATMAN ENDS.  In that reality, the third film, THE DARK KNIGHT HUNTED, featured both Eric Bana as The Black Mask and Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Penguin (along with that great scene-stealing cameo by Heath Ledger as the Joker).  A good flick, from what I've heard.

In our own reality, the film that stands out for me, the one that makes me like Hoffman's work as a whole is in 2000's ALMOST FAMOUS, where he plays cynical rock writer Lester Bangs.

I'm sure I mentioned it when Roger Ebert died, but his review of ALMOST FAMOUS made me scrape together what (very) little money I had during that time, and go see the film.  The two scenes that made the biggest impact on me were the one where everyone in the bus shares a joyful moment singing "Tiny Dancer," and the one where poor William Miller calls Lester Bangs, needing a friend after his dreams fall apart.

I try, less often than I should, but I am so far from one of the cool kids, that catching my own reflection can sometimes be shocking.  For every Saturday night spent among friends or in social occasions, there are another twenty, watching "Saturday Night Live" by myself, laughing (hopefully) hard enough that I don't notice how lonely I am.

This exchange between Bangs (Hoffman) and Miller (Patrick Fugit) speaks to me so deeply that I see it as Truth (with a capital T) in the way that an old black lady memorizes a Bible passage and recites it when the going gets the toughest.  And I recognize that that's self-indulgent, and pretty darn myopic, but boy, do I love that "when you're uncool" speech.

If I could write something that . . . that right, I think I might be cool.

Rish Outfield

Audiobook Adventures 34: Kalin: A Battle of Voices

So, as I was explaining in my earlier blog post (a month or more ago now) about the E.C. Tubb book "Kalin," I had a real headache with a) the voice I chose for the character of Kalin, and b) the accent I have given her (which sound like it's one and the same, but both is and isn't).  It's so complicated, I figured I'd dedicate a whole post to it.

From the first chapter of the book, I decided to give Kalin a unique accent (unique for me anyway, as I tend to do five or six different "stock" voices for background characters, and try to keep celebrities in mind for specific parts, such as a bad Terence Stamp or Anthony Hopkins impression, which may not sound like them to you, but help to keep the voice consistent, which is way more important than sounding like General Zod or Hannibal Lecter is).  I haven't sold a lot of these audiobooks, but I imagine that someone who buys one or two might buy them all, since there is something of a fanbase out there (at least enough to find websites and collections and essays and forum discussions about them).  Maybe they'll appreciate if the love interests don't always sound alike.

I've learned the hard way in 2013 that I really should read the projects through before I start the narration, and I now do that with short stories, but can't quite muster the energy required to do it for novels.  So, for each of these Dumarest books, I have sought out summaries online, and found a cool site that has all the books summed up in pretty good detail.*  Whenever possible, I will do this from now on, trying to avoid the kinds of mistakes I've previously made.

In that overview of "Kalin," it was explained that--spoilers ahead if you're actually interested in reading Book Four--Kalin is not actually Kalin, but a character called Keelan, who was nearly killed and saved through the use of a symbiote which transferred her mind into the body we know as Kalin.  Her actual body is still on her homeworld, in a comatose state, and though we don't find that out till the end of the book, we meet her two brothers early on, and having read the summary, I gave the brothers (and indeed, everybody on her world) similar accents to Kalin.**

I cannot predict the reasons why E.C. Tubb writes the way that he does, unless he does it like Stephen King often preaches about, and simply makes the books up as he goes along, not knowing where each is going, and then just published them with absolutely no attempt to go back and give it a cohesive structure.  For example, in the middle of the book, a bunch of characters are sitting around a fire, each discussing their plight, and one is referred to as "a man in the shadows."  I tried to give this guy an appropriately villainous voice and accent, thinking immediately of him as a sort of puppetmaster, someone who operated from the shadows.  Only in editing did I realize that none of these characters ever appear again, and that sinister one was described as the man in the shadows simply because Tubb didn't need to ever give him a name.  Sigh. 

Anyhow, in "Kalin," it seems that the whole Kalin/Keelan thing is misdirection, so you don't realize that the comatose girl and her brothers are related to her.  This is compounded when, at another point in the book, a man is introduced searching for his long-lost daughter.

Immediately, the reader knows that this man has to be Kalin's father, because she is the only female character in the damned book.  But I had read the overview, and I knew that this man turns out to be the father of Mallini, the body in which Kalin/Keelan is inhabiting.  I gave this man an American accent (a sort of New York tough guy voice, though he turns out to be a nice guy in the end***), and went on with my life until I reached the end of the book.

At the end, the girl in the coma communicates mentally with Earl Dumarest.  She is, physically, the body of Kalin, the girl with the funky accent, but mentally, she's Mallini, whose father has an American voice.  So, when this happens, I had no idea what to go with. 

Again, spoilers if I've not stated it...  Coma Girl (Keelan) is dying, and her voice is described as so strained and in pain that it sounds as though an old woman is speaking.  I had recorded for two hours when I got to the end of the book, and it was easy to put just a bit of pressure on my vocal cords and sound like a scratchy Jimmy Stewart filibustering in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON.  Vocally, it's probably the best work I have ever done (but what do I know?), but I still couldn't figure out how to perform her voice.  She's the actual, physical body of Kalin, who grew up on the world of the accents, but she is not the body we have gotten to know throughout the book, which speaks in that accent.  She could speak like Keelan/Kalin or she could speak like Mallini.

I performed it both ways, with both accents, doing the horrible screechy old/young woman voice for each.

In the end, I think it has to be the American version, because I--Rish Outfield the narrator and editor--am interpreting that the book is saying that Mallini's mind went into the comatose body of Keelan, even though who really knows what happened?  Also, I'm sure E.C. Tubb, when he wrote it, envisioned everybody to have the same accent (probably something British), so it was incidental whose voice she spoke in.

Artistically, I think the voice should be the American one, since that's how I've chosen to interpret the text.  Narratively, though, I wonder if it would be confusing to have a different voice talk to Earl in his mind than the one we've come to associate with Kalin . . . who this both is and isn't.  What would be narratively correct might be confusing to a listener, and what would be immediately recognizable to the ear, might not make sense, if this sort of thing can make sense.**** 

I fear I may not have explained this well enough either.  The thing is, they're BOTH Keelan and BOTH Mallini, inextricably linked mentally, even though one body is healthy and one is severely damaged.

If you'd like to listen to it, you can judge for yourself.  If you'd rather not have the ending of the book spoiled, I totally understand.

Rish Outfield, Audiobook Boy

*Of course, had I read the book first, I would've avoided the Hispanic accent problem I mentioned before, but I actually get very little reading done anymore, as my spare time is taken with audiobooks and podcasting.

**In the very first book, "The Winds of Gath," I decided that the people of each world should all have the same accent, just to simplify things, and that has been a great help to me in my readings, as each of these E.C. Tubb books have taken place on three to five worlds, none of which are the same.  In fact, infuriatingly, there have been only two actual repeated characters in any of the books so far (Earl Dumarest and, technically, his memory of the unnamed Captain who rescued/adopted him as a child), and then the voice of the Master Cyclan, which is a hive mind I have chosen to give the voice of Old Spock.  But I digress.

***Except that he never does show up again.  Again, the weird structure of the writing introduces the character as important, but jettisons him, then has somebody else explain at the end his importance.  Like if it were a TV series, and the actor that played him died along the way.  I cannot fathom how this works to a narrative's advantage, or that there might be people out there who appreciate this.

****Did you ever notice that Counsellor Troi had an alien accent on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," but her mother spoke in an American one (so it must have been her dad who spoke like that), and then, when they finally introduced her father, he too spoke with a bloody American accent?  Maybe those jocks were right in taunting and beating up us Star Trek fans all those years.

Rish performs "Kalin" (Dumarest 4) over at Audible

This was the fourth Earl Dumarest book, and for some reason, I never did a post announcing it.  I did talk about my problems interpreting the ending, but in March (2014) I discovered I'd never done a write-up for it.

She here it is.  This one has Earl falling in love a second time, with a red-haired girl named Kalin, who has the ability to see the future (or possible futures).  Together, they may actually gain riches and the pathway to Earl's long-lost homeworld of Earth.  And if you've read even one of these books, you can probably guess whether it works out between them or not.

Here's yonder link: http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Kalin-Audiobook/B00I08B7CE/ref=a_search_c4_1_1_srTtl?qid=1395682013&sr=1-1

I worked really hard on this one, and it, and to a lesser extent, the book that followed, really burned me out on audiobooks in general.  One day soon, though (again, writing from the future), I'm going to crack open another Dumarest of Terra books, and start this process anew.

Audiobook Adventures: Post 33

This is gonna be a short post, mostly because I wanted to mention Black Data.  November, and particularly December, were very busy months for me, and I focused on other things over audiobooks and blogging about audiobooks.  But now we're into January, and I've finally sat down to really focus on it again.

I do still have that write-up to post about "Kalin," but I figured I'd wait on it because that book isn't finished yet.  The publisher took about three weeks to get back to me on it, and when they did, there was a list of changes as long as my arm (or as long as somebody with long arms's arm).  I am really tempted to bitch about their complaints that my reading didn't match the text, since the book itself had plenty of typos and nonsensical sentences I had to translate into correct English, but I suspect that some of their changes were actual mistakes on my part.  I honestly don't know the difference between "torturous" and "tortuous," or "resplendency" and "respendicity."

I haven't taken the time to make all the changes and re-record bits of that book, but I really ought to.  Even if it only sells two copies, that's two more bucks than I currently have.

Instead, I focused the past few days finishing up "The Jester of Scar," which is the fifth (and last?) book in my Dumarest contract.  I had only three chapters edited when I finished up narrating the book two nights ago, sitting down and forcing myself to read into the wee hours of the morning until it was finished.  Then, yesterday, I discovered that both Chapters Four and Five had a sort of interference on the recording, a static that I hadn't heard while recording* the chapters, which completely ruins the recording, and which experience has taught me, is impossible to remove.

So, last night, I sat and re-recorded the two chapters, then checked Chapter Six, only to find that the static was there for a minute or so, and I had to redo the first page of that chapter too.

Now I'm sitting here, editing the old and the new recordings, and relieved to hear that the ones from 2013 blend seamlessly with the 2014 ones.  One less headache to wor--  Actually, I'm blogging instead of editing right now, which gives evidence as to why I'm a week late on my deadline (whoops, nine days late now).  Sigh.

The main reason I stopped editing (besides laziness) was that, when I had to re-record last night, I came upon a character name that I hadn't any memory of (indeed, I think I may have pronounced his name two different ways between now and then).  Luckily, I had taken notes when I first recorded the chapter, and had written "American, talks like he has a cigar in his mouth."

Immediately, I knew how he was supposed to sound, and went to work, the character totally recognizable in my mind.  In editing it, I had to smile, because he really does sound like he has a cigar, and I wonder if the listener(s?) of the audiobook will wonder why he sounds like he's got his mouth full, or if they'll just accept it and move on.  I do so enjoy narrating audiobooks (when it works).

Like the other E.C. Tubb books, this one is filled with characters who have names, but only appear once, and never again.  In my notes, I have descriptions like "Low-class Brit" and "Throaty redneck," which hopefully sound different than "Aussie ruffian" and "Friendly Canadian 30-something."**  I did throw in my usual celebrity notations, even though no one will ever know I was trying to do Billy Dee Williams or Gene Hackman or Giles from "Buffy," since they're really just faces I see while reading, rather than me doing impressions.

The oddest one, at least to me, was giving one of the characters the voice of "Black Data."  In this series of books, there are villains who are emotionless plotters that, predictably, try to kill Earl Dumarest at the end and end up getting killed by him.  The first one, I voiced as Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," but I have tried to switch each one up in each subsequent book, doing one with an English accent, doing one with a pouty expression on my face (which made him sound like Lorne Michaels or Doctor Evil), doing one as Mr. Spock.  But this one, I thought I would do as Data, if he were a black guy in Chicago playing him.

It was really hard, because I tended to lean more toward an urban inflection, or more toward an emotionless, curious Starfleet officer.  It, and indeed, many of my voices, could turn out to be simply obnoxious, but I hope that he at least sounds unlike any other character I've done.

Man, it would be nice to get paid for all this work I'm doing.

Rish Outfield, Audiobook Guy

*Which makes me wonder how that is even possible, unless I declined to wear my headphones during the recording of those two chapters (which would be stupid, but not out of character for me).  The second lesson Big and I discovered in doing our podcast was to always wear headphones while recording.  That way, if the refrigerator starts humming, or a baby starts crying, or a cellphone starts interfering with your signal, you hear it as the microphone picks it up, instead of later when it's difficult (if not impossible) to re-create.  We were reminded of this basic lesson as recently as this week, when we discovered that the microphone that recorded Renee Chambliss at one of our NMX sittings was not turned on.

**The Canadian turned out to be a very major character, which shouldn't have been a surprise, since I read an extensive summary of the book before I started it, so I'd know which characters I'd have to create a persona for, and which could just be "English dude."  To my ear, Canadian sounds just like American, except with a couple of words said wrong, but he started to have some sort of rhythm to his speaking, a cadence that made him a character instead of just an accent.  And that's nice.

A Couple of New Media Expo Thoughts

For the second year in a row, I got to spend the weekend at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, side by side with Big Anklevich, attending panels and recording sessions of my own work and others'.  It was a wholly positive experience, and the people we hung around with were so awesome, it made me want to change my whole life, working harder and perfecting my craft so as to be worthy of both their company and their adulation.

The weather was pretty good, and it got to sixty degrees one of the days.  We did some walking around the Strip, and spent time with our fellow podcasters, most of whom we'd only ever met once before, yet felt like old friends.  We watched the music-choreographed fountains outside the Bellagio, rode the roller coaster at the New York, New York, and had our second-annual karaoke night at the Ellis Island casino (which my jacket still smells like).

I could actually do a whole blog post about the latter, as I was somewhat hesitant to go this year, having felt the locale and DJ inferior last year, but I'm sure glad I went this year.  We spent about ninety minutes longer there this year, got to sing a bit more, and supported everybody that went up and performed.  My voice did go out on me halfway through a song, but I was convinced to get up and do a song as Fake Sean Connery.  That was fun.

We also did some readings of stories, a couple of which I had written, and people were surprisingly enthusiastic about that too.  I honestly figured it would be Big and me who got something out of our recording sessions, but the others gave the impression that they were enjoying the experience, even though they were probably nice enough not to let on if that wasn't the case.

Like last year, the New Media Expo was held in the Rio Hotel and Convention Center, and it was a great place to develop new marketing arenas for your company or small business.  We were too busy to go to a lot of panels, so I didn't hear the word "monetizing" nearly as much as last year.  It turned out that, instead of the single panel Big and I were on last year, we were on five this year (technically, I wasn't a part of the first panel, but I got to introduce it, so I'm counting it).

On our first day, we met a charismatic bald guy named Marshal Sylver, who it turns out is a motivational speaker and hypnotist, but it disturbed me to find him sitting upon an honest-to-Odin throne in the main hall, surrounded by acolytes.  And the throne may or may not have been built out of baby skulls, I didn't dare check.

At one of the booths, there were these Eastern European women who would ask passersby if they were feeling stressed, and then attach electrodes to their bodies, jolting them with varying levels of electricity using a device that looked exactly like an mp3 player.  Big is always exercising and knocking up his wives, so of course he volunteered to try out the massagers.  Unable to say no to a Russian accent, I also got the electrodes attached to me, though unlike Big, I wasn't asked to take my shirt off for the procedure.

What followed was something out of a hazing ritual on Fraternity Row rather than something you would pay a Swedish or Asian sweatshop refugee to administer.  Buzzing reminiscent of licking a 9 volt battery entered my body on my neck and shoulder, and when I turned down the intensity of the vibration, the woman said, "No, you are turning up level like turning up volume; like this," and actually made it worse.

I told her where our secret base was located, as well as the names and aliases of everyone in my organization.*  I cannot imagine anyone enjoying the feeling of french-kissing a light socket, but to each their own; my friend Jeff does not like spaghetti.

A few minutes later, another Russian-sounding woman handed me a solar cellphone charger which seemed like a wonderful gift, until she told me she wanted two hundred dollars for it.  It really was a remarkable device, and I've no doubt that every new cellphone sold in 2022 will include one for free.  A much smaller version, that is.

Not far away was a booth where they had a caricature artist who would do a cartoony version of you using his iPad, and then print it out for you to keep.  I asked him several questions about his craft, and despite his reluctance to give me a good answer, he thanked me for the insightful questions when we were done.  He worked fast and well, despite my caricature looking like the survivor of a nuclear holocaust, and despite him refusing to do one for Abbie Hilton.  Big and I figured we'd stick them on our website, though we may never actually get around to it.

This year, Renee Chambliss was the one who organized all our panels and readings, and though she did it tirelessly, I think she ended up pretty tired in the end.  When we met up with Renee the night before the convention, we were shown a room (Miranda 7, which will probably end up in a story of mine someday, maybe as the name of a starship) and told that it would be ours for the entirety of the conference, with all our panels and presentations done there.

Also, there was free water for speakers, our own personal security guard (a small foreign woman of about seventy), and a ton of free ballpoint pens.  I told Big that it was my plan to "steal" a hundred of the pens, but I only managed to snag the following:

But it's a start.

One thing I didn't appreciate was when someone would ask a panelist a question, and they wouldn't answer it, but instead would refer them to a class they teach or a book they sell.  It may be the correct way to do things, financially, but it got on my fugging nerves.

I ran into an audiobook narrator later and asked him a question, one on one, thinking I would get a genuine answer.  Instead, I got, "I deal with that extensively in my course.  Would you like to sign up?"  Compare that to Bryan Lincoln, who opened up his laptop to demonstrate the answer when someone asked him a question about an audio effect.

But that's really the difference between the things we were talking about and the rest of the conference.  Big entertained me one night by reading the names of the panels that were running at the same time as ours.  My favorite was one that went something like "Taking Over The World Using Only Your Pinterest Page."

I mock, but I realize that I could use a bit more capitalism, a bit more ambition, a bit more drive to take advantage of the brave new world that is podcasting and internet publication.  Best-selling author (and podcasting royalty) Scott Sigler gave a panel where he talked about three things he did to get where he is today, and three things he wishes he had never done.  It was slick, and slightly-corporate, and felt like he'd given the presentation a bunch of times, but he had some good stuff in there, stuff I really ought to incorporate.

We also got to do a live reading of a wonderful story Sigler had written called "Chuckles Mulroney, Attorney for the Damned."  Nobody came to the panel for some reason (it was toward the end of the last day, which might have had something to do with it, but the room really should have been full, especially since the panel that preceded it was).  Big voiced the titular character, the author himself voiced a literary agent, and I got to perform the character of Satan.  I wasn't paid to do the recording, but I surely would've done it for free.

Upon coming home from the New Media Expo, I discovered (to my horror) that some bills I had dismissed as imaginary have come due.  The bottom line is so great as to be something out of an Adam Sandler movie, forcing him into the local Backgammon tournament despite the fact that seeing red and black discs drives him into a murderous rage.  To put it another way, if I signed over fifty percent of every paycheck, I would have my debt paid off two or three years after I pass away.

So, I really, really need to buckle down and try to make some money, either with my audio work or my podcast.

I keep imagining that one day I'll wake up, and somebody will have paid me to write a screenplay (that actually gets made, that is), and my life will change, and suddenly, I'll be a successful writer.  Or that somebody somewhere will hear my crappy little recordings of audiobooks and say, "Wow, I want to fly that guy to the big city and pay him an ungodly amount to do his thing in a studio!"  But the truth is, I could publish more, podcast more, and record more audiobooks, and actually make money doing it, maybe not big city money, but enough that it pays to wash my sheets and disgusting socks.

Hell, I discovered that people other than me really like to hear Fake Sean Connery sing.  I could have an entire YouTube page with Fake Sir Sean doing touching and/or inappropriate Pop songs, and total strangers might appreciate it.

So, I need to try harder, and I need to draw attention to things when I'm done.

I've got a resolution.   Or two, I suppose.

Rish Outfield, Poor Podcaster

*As a result, Announcer Man was tortured to death over a three day period.  Sad.