Alright, here's the second half of my Dead & Breakfast holiday-ish tale, "There'll Be Scary Ghost Stories," where coworkers gather to share their experiences at the Noble Oaks Bed & Breakfast. Enjoy?
To download the episode, just Right-Click HERE.
Not sure why I'm posting this here, but a Facebook friend of mine, Eric Busby, posted a link to a trailer for "the greatest podcast ever," narrated by Morgan Freeman. And then he instantly revealed that it wasn't REALLY Morgan Freeman narrating, but an impersonator . . .
. . . and I thought, "Dang, I wish he'd asked me to do it. I do a sort of okay Morgan Freeman."
But then I clicked on THE LINK, and it made a bit more sense to me.
Thirteen years ago, PodCastle honored me with a request to narrate Tim Shaw/Heather Pratt's story "The Christmas Mummy." It got a more positive reaction than anything I had done up to that point (and maybe since). So, I was pleased when Dave Wallace let me know that the most recent PodCastle episode, PC 818, is a repackaging of that old show (even if my audio quality back then was *slightly* worse than today).
It tells the tale of a family visited by a holiday-themed mummy, as well as Christmas ninjas. Where could that go wrong? Check it out HERE!
So, due to the holidays, I'm going to switch Episodes 267 and 266, and we'll get the latter in a couple of weeks. You'll survive, I'm pretty sure.
Rish presents half of his Dead & Breakfast story "There'll Be Scary Ghost Stories" for the holidays. Apologies in advance.
If you want to download it, just Right-Click HERE.
If you want to support Rish on Patreon, as a sort of early present, click HERE.
Logo by Gino "There'll Be Mariah Carey Ghost Stories" Moretto.
I mentioned in the last post that the video for Day 2 was particularly crappy. But I was very surprised the next day when I went to post Day 3's video, to find that I had re-done Day 2's video again, but better. So, I tried to post that redux version, and then deleted the previous day's video.* And then I discovered, to a low-level horror, that Day 2's video cut off partway through, simply stopping its upload for some benighted reason.
Is there a time limit for Instagram videos? Did that mean Day 1's video got cut off halfway through as well?
No. The answer was no (apparently, for both questions). So, I uploaded Day 2's video a second time, and this time, the whole thing appeared (something I could only discover by watching it through to the end, Instagram providing no means of skipping to the end until the darn thing is posted.
*Of course, that puts me a full twenty-four hours off my timeline. But what I think I'll do is post the real Day 3 video tonight before I go to bed, so there are technically two releases today, but they're hours apart.
I really bit off more than I could chew with this 12 Days of Christmas Carol thing. I hadn't anticipated how long it would take to do an abridgement, and then write it up on a dry erase board, and it doesn't help that it starts getting dark at, what, three-thirty?
So, there's a learning curve, and what I learned on Day 2 was to put the camera ABOVE me, rather than below me, because it ruins the "illusion" when you can see my darn face the whole time.
Sigh.
About Thanksgiving, I got this idea to present Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" as part of the 12 Days of Christmas, one post each day leading up to The Day, which seemed a bit ambitious, but doable (especially since I had a month to prepare). What I had to figure out was how to slice up the book into a dozen parts, and then see how to present those sections.
What I ended up doing was taking each part of the story (for example, the introduction of Scrooge) and abridging it down to as short as I could manage, then writing it up on a dry erase board, setting it in front of me, and trying to go through it in one take. I recorded the first couple of them so you could "enjoy" the effort, and I'll present it here.
It's very rough (I don't think there's a single one I didn't curse through), and the darn mask looks absolutely ridiculous barely covering the front of my face, yet squashing my nose badly enough I could barely breathe*, and preventing me from seeing the script. But ah well, it was worth a try.
*By the fifth or sixth day, the steam from my breath has started to warp the inside of the cardboard, which leads me to believe I'll have to throw the mask away when I finish.
Everybody in my household got the flu this week, and it hit me hardest two days ago. I slept most of the day away, and felt pretty crummy about it.* So yesterday, I got a little bit done, but I was still achey and coughing. And today, I discovered my voice was completely blighted by my illness--for example, when I called my cousin, he absolutely did not want to hear my voice (oh wait, that's every day--bad example). When I called Big Anklevich, he was not at all pleased to hear me, and it didn't help that I started the conversation with "My, what a lovely day for an exorcism"--and would ruin whatever recording I did with it, despite it getting mighty late to get my Christmas episode done.
In the end, though I may falter, nothing gets Fake Sean Connery down.
*By that, I mean, I had felt physically sick, but I also felt guilty for having slept fourteen to sixteen hours instead of getting any writing, exercise, or work with a paycheck attached done. Funny how you can be your own a-hole boss sometimes.
So, I went ahead and published the text version of my Lara & the Witch novella, "Bundling Made Easy." This one takes place (mostly) during Lara Demming's junior year of high school, and deals with her falling for a handsome basketball player named Scott. But everything is great--too great--and Lara waits for the other shoe to drop.
This was the third story I wrote in the series, before many of those I've already published, and immediately I went back and started writing stories to fill in the three (or four) year gap between "You're In Good Hands" and "Bundling." Just this year, I wrote another one that takes place during that gap, and started two more. There's also a novel I wrote that takes place after this one, but it'll surely be a while before I publish it.
The reason I'm mentioning this at all is that, in the time since I last published on Amazon, the dread spectre of A.I. has risen its mostly-digital head. They asked me if any part of the book had been written or illustrated by A.I.,* and when I said yes, they made me detail every bit of it, and wouldn't accept nothing for an answer. Seriously, it would NOT accept nothing when it asked what percentage of the book's text was created by A.I., and finally, I had to write "Some/Very Little" and then typed "None" in the space for more information. And then it did it again for the illustrations and again for the cover art (in retrospect, I understand why they'd ask that--since people are pants-pizzingly terrified of A.I. right now--but I seriously considered simply lying and saying that none of it was A.I.-generated, just so I could skip the step).
I went back and added a link to "Bundling" in the text of the first two stories, and they too now asked how much A.I. was in them, before I was allowed to proceed. Luckily, those were clearly zero, and now I wonder if I shouldn't eschew A.I. altogether in the future, because what if the A.I. programs' owners start demanding they get a share of every bit of entertainment that used their algorithm. Or maybe I should just avoid A.I. altogether in the future because it's the moral thing to do. Hmmm.
De todos modos, if you'd like to buy a copy of "Bundling Made Easy," it's available HERE.
*The cover was created by the A.I. program Perchance, and then Big put my name over it.
Rish performs M.R. James's 1904 story "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come To You, My Lad." No whistling, please.
Months back, Marshal Latham tried his darndest to end our friendship with his writing contest, the Quordel Quell. You may remember.
It was a contest where those who entered were given four words, generated by a game of Quordel (engineered by the Devil himself, by the way), that we were supposed to craft a story around. I struggled quite a bit with it, but went ahead and wrote a story, "With A Banjo On My Knee," and submitted it.*
It told of Garrett McClaren's discovery of a banjo that seems to have an unusual, maybe even magical effect on people.
Well, Marshal has created a production of that story over on the Journey Into... podcast, and it's available now, if you'd like to listen to it. He went nuts with full-cast (again), and there are a bunch of familiar faceless voices in this one.** I lent my voice to the main character's douchey boss (which is a bit strange, having a bit part in my own story, but I'm always happy to participate, as long as it doesn't involve editing), a young man with a banjo that people quite enjoy the sound of. Feel free to check it out HERE.
*It may have been the last time I ever wrote a story. And can you blame me? (you know who I blame)
**Big Anklevich also voices one of the characters.
