Yet another HorrorAddicts episode has dropped (how do they do it?). I got to play the lead in "Beyond the Ensuite," but it's not like a movie or TV show, where I'm onscreen the whole time. In a production like this, I'm only described until I speak, halfway through.
I get to play ("play?") a backward, stammering single man, nervously uncomfortable with the discovery of a naked woman in a secret indoor bathhouse. Hijinks ensue. Check it out HERE.
Note: I told Emerian Rich I didn't know what an ensuite was when I did the lines. Then I looked it up, so I could be less ignorant. But now, I'm writing this blog post . . . and I've forgotten what the devil an ensuite is.
Once again, Emerian Rich has lost her mind, and had me do lines for a story on the HorrorAddicts podcast. "The Desiccated Heart" by Sumiko Saulson is about a group of young English Punk rockers who go to a haunted location to record and find inspiration (we've all been there) . . . with unexpected results.
I voice two of the characters, and Emerian voices the rest, and she does a good job making them sound different from one another (something I strive for in my own readings). But the big creative leap we both took was trying to sing the lyrics to the "song" the band is working on, including a passage in cryptic Latin.
This was quite a challenge, trying to sing in Latin (with an English accent), but it's even worse than that, as the band is supposed to be singing along, and Emz had to try and match it with her dialogue. But hey, madness takes its toll. Check it out HERE.
So, the year is half over, and unless I'm related to Gandalf, my life is way more than half over. I had set a goal for exercise in 2023 of 200 days, and you know, that's very achievable. That means that if I exercised every day from the start of the year, I could take August through December off, and still make my goal.
So, here's where I am so far:
But I'm not in a contest with you (look at you, though, how well you're doing . . . it's inspiring, really), I'm just doing it for me, and one hundred and twelve days between January and July is something to be proud of.
Full disclosure: I'm posting this in July, and I have already fallen way behind (I'm currently sick with a summer cold, so my desire to exercise is somewhere lower than that of Jabba the Hutt).
In the most rambly episode ever, I present various topics, recorded separately, such as a Tale of eBay Horror rerun*, contemplating paying someone to edit my audiobooks, talking about a book called "Curse of the Reaper," the results of a writing contest, Grimace, the second Spider-verse movie, a presentation of "Mystery of the Semi-Detached" by E. Nesbit, self-doubt in my own abilities, and hey, why not more Grimace talk?
To download the episode, just Right-Click HERE.
*Originally, this was "Four Topics In Search..." but when I realized the eBay Horror was a repeat, I added the Nesbit story to make up for it. Look, Damien, it's all for you!
For some reason, Shawn over at Pseudopod asked me to perform "Nymph of Darkness" by C.L. Moore and Forrest J. Ackerman, a pulpy story from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, about Northwest Smith and his encounter with a fugitive girl who happens to be invisible.
Catherine Lucille Moore was one of the first women to write Science Fiction and Fantasy, and whose most famous work, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," got made into that LAST MIMZY movie Marshal keeps threatening to make us watch. She wrote at least thirteen Northwest Smith stories that were published between 1933 and 1940.
Forry Ackerman was the godfather of fandom, and I regret that I didn't get to meet him (or go on his famous house tour) before he died in 2008. But I didn't know he was an oft-published writer (I did know he was the literary agent for a bunch of famous writers, and I guess that makes a bit of sense), and the co-author of this story from 1935.
They use the word "queer" about eleventy times in the story, but it's only jarring the first ten or so. Check it out HERE.
I decided to give the Venusians a different accent than the humans, and being a lazy--if brilliant--audiobook narrator, I just gave them a different Earth accent. I imagine there are narrators out there that would've developed an entirely original accent for their alien characters . . . but sadly, those narrators are now dead.
This was just one story in the Northwest Smith series, and it would be good work to do all the stories (kind of like we had permission to do all the Catastrophe Baker stories on the Dunesteef*), though there's a stark difference between Mike Reznick's stories and this. In case I forgot to link it above, here it is again.
*Do we still?
To download the episode, just Right-Click HERE.
I wasn't going to be able to come to the cabin today--I had been told yesterday that they would be re-paving the road in for three days in the middle of the week, and next week, I have Indy Jones tickets, and the week after that, I'm going to California with my family (to Oceanside, where my mom once had a beach house, but she ended up having to sell it once she couldn't afford it anymore [sadly, she sold it for way less than she bought it for, since the housing bubble had burst]). So, I knew I'd not be doing the cabin thing, but I still met my cousin for lunch, as we often do on Wednesday afternoons.
But my brother texted me today to tell me that the re-paving was moved to next week, so I quickly headed back home, and tried to get everything done so I could do my cabin trip after all.
Today's the longest day of the year, but the sun is still getting low in the sky, and I haven't accomplished much of anything while here today (I edited audio for an hour, but it doesn't feel like it).
Yesterday, I took my nephew to see ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE, and really marveled at how well-constructed it was, how emotional and rewarding it was on a second viewing (which is not always the case), and remarked to myself on the way to my cousin's house just how untalented it made me feel, since I had sat down to record more of my 2020 story "Winter Break" the night before, and found almost none of it to be working. Am I so limited in talent that something I worked on, created from my imagination, fell so short of what I meant for it to do?
Of course, my cousin spent a minute or two telling me how dumb the SUPER MARIO BROS. movie was, and that--I believe--has been the biggest hit of the whole year. You never know what people will cotton to (I sat down with my nephews the other night to watch a movie and they chose THE ZOOKEEPER--a movie whose trailer was so stupid I lost an entire grade's worth of knowledge after watching it--and I thought, "Huh, this is pretty good. I wonder if this got better or worse reviews than PAUL BLART: MALL COP. And I discovered it was absolutely excoriated by critics (except for Ebert, for some reason), and just for fun, I looked up Kevin James's career, and saw that the last movie he starred in was years ago, one I'd never heard of before . . . and it has a ZERO in Rotten Tomatoes.
That's sad.
Is that sad?
The next day, I watched THE LOST CITY, which I recall being a pretty big hit a year or so back, and had a clever trailer, where Sandra Bullock asked Brad Pitt why he was so handsome, and he said, "My dad was a weatherman."
*Unfortunately, THE LOST CITY was thoroughly mediocre, and I kept being surprised by how weak the dialogue was, like it was all ad-libbed, , but the filmmakers kept saying, "No, no, we'll make it work in post." There was one kind of brilliant, unexpected moment early on in the film, which was pretty cool, admittedly . . . and then they ended the film by undoing that moment, as a giant eff-you to me, who wasted his time watching it.
Normally, I would feel better about myself after watching this, because I'd say, "No, no, I can do better than this. I will do better than this, this I vow," but then I remembered that this flick did very, very well at the box office (indeed, I had to put my name on a waiting list at the library to check out the DVD), so now I'm back to feeling like a failure. Buh.
I did a lot of work while I was here, and when the sun was getting low, I didn't feel like I had blown it--wasted my time--and that feels good.
There's good and bad in this world, son. Take an umbrella.
A few months back, I told you about the contest the nefarious Marshal "The Brain Liquidator" Latham dreamed up for his podcast, a writing contest where you had to write a story inspired by the four words that were used in a random game of Quordle. I wrote a story, called "With A Banjo On My Knee," and submitted it.
And promptly forgot about it, moving on to new and exciting projects that I will never finish (I remain reassuringly consistent, folks). Until I got a message from Marshal that the contest had ended, the scores were tabulated . . . and I came in Third. So, there you go.
