Audiobooks – Page 8 – Teel McClanahan

Things moving forward, the standard rollercoaster

Things are moving forward. Both of my new books, the novel Forget What You Can’t Remember and its companion book of short stories, More Lost Memories are well on their way to being broadly available. The audio version of Forget What You Can’t Remember has begun appearing online, in the Modern Evil Podcast and at Podiobooks.com, just after the first of the year. Recording has been going forward reasonably well, considering my still-lingering headcold, and I’m much less stressed out about keeping up than I was with Lost and Not Found. I’ve been doing a bit of painting again (here’s a bit of a preview) and I had a good sales night at the Art Walk this month (and paid for a space through all of 2009), selling out of my mini paintings. Have to make some more, soon.

I can’t nail down specific dates (which is part of why I don’t bother trying to do things like build buzz or drum up pre-orders), but the two new books were sent to Lightning Source (who does my printing and distribution) on 12/26/08, approved and made available for printing on 1/5/09, and will probably be available to order through booksellers everywhere in the next week or two (incl. everything from Amazon.com and bn.com to your local Borders & your local independent bookseller). I’ve got to fiddle about with converting FWYCR to an eBook – I haven’t done it in over half a year, and it was basically a one-time ordeal that lasted weeks… I may ask for help around the internets this time. If I remember correctly, the kindle version -ie: the only one that pays- is the hardest to get anywhere close to right. I’m aiming to have the eBook version up by the end of January, so I’m to stressing about it.

In more personal news (yes, yes, I know, if I were a proper blogger I’d make multiple posts…) my emotional instability is moving forward as well, along the infinite rollercoaster track that’s normal for me. I noticed a week or so ago for the first time some evidence that I’ve already been experiencing what experts call “major depression” for not less than a month prior to Christmas. Up, down, up, down, luckily on a much longer wavelength than “real” bipolars, going through the down part for months at a stretch, then usually a slow ramp up through “okay” and a couple of days (up to weeks, occasionally) of hard-burning “manic” that crash out just as hard. Funny thing, right now I can’t remember (for sure) when my last ‘up’ was. I remember NaNoWriMo being … less than easy, so probably not then. I know the writing of Forget What You Can’t Remember taking 6 months or more, so I certainly wasn’t on a burn for it. I ground that thing out by working hard on it, day after day, week after week, month after month.

Anyway, I’m not doing great. Personal hygene isn’t being kept up. Household chores being neglected. Productivity is fairly low, along with inspiration. Appetite is way off. Sleep schedule is wacky. I’ve gotten sick several times in the last couple of months, and it’s been lingering these last weeks – my immune system is weak, I guess. Headaches. Mood swings. Feeling bad in new and different and old and familar ways, sometimes in series, sometimes overlapping. bleh.

But I know it’s part of what’s normal for me. What I’ve chosen. It occurred to me today I ought to start another poetry journal, see if any of this wants to be put down. Probably ought to have started it a couple of months ago. meh. I’ll get through. It’s part of moving forward. There’ll be another peak, another plateau. There’ll be another drop, too. Keep moving forward. Being down, right now, is part of that.

A lot of podcasting

You’ve been reading a lot about it here because it’s been dominating my time and my thoughts a lot lately. In case you somehow aren’t aware, I’ve been podcasting my fiction and poetry via the Modern Evil Podcast, and simultaneously releasing my podcast novels over at Podiobooks.com in sync with my personal feed. My feed (the Modern Evil Podcast) has also included (in addition to the weekly, half-hour episodes roughly identical to the Podiobooks release) poetry and short fiction in mid-week episodes.

<complain>
What this means, for my time, is that I have effectively been running three weekly podcasts: The podiobooks feed, with just the novel, the Modern Evil Podcast Friday episodes, with the novel and alternate introduction and closing, and the Modern Evil Podcast mid-week episodes, with my poetry and short fiction. ~2.2x the recording and editing, 3x the mixing, converting, and uploading vs. doing one weekly podcast. It’s been a lot of work, and time and thought consuming.
</complain>

So, along with the upcoming release of my new book, Forget What You Can’t Remember (now targeting a January release), I’m going to be starting podcasting it. In fact, I’m planning to overlap the two novels’ releases, so that people who listen to the final episode of Lost and Not Found on Podiobooks can immediately go subscribe to Forget What You Can’t Remember and so that people who subscribe to the Modern Evil Podcast will -instead of going for a while without episodes- get an extra episode or two during the overlap. Now, here’s the lazy part:

I’m going to continue releasing on the MEPodcast at the same time as Podiobooks, but Forget What You Can’t Remember is already broken into chapters of roughly even length, each of which should be around 15 minutes long. I’m going to release one chapter at a time, twice a week, into each feed. No poetry or short stories in the MEPodcast during the run, just chapter after chapter of the novel. Also: because of the structure of Forget What You Can’t Remember, the majority of chapters have no “breaks” in them, and thus will have a somewhat reduced editing time and effort – a savings then multiplied by the double feeds.

The Forget What You Can’t Remember podcast should wrap up around mid-April, 2009, according to this release schedule. Hopefully by then I’ll have another book or two written.

Attempt number seven

It’s that time again. National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo to those in the know. This is the 10th year it’s existed, and they’re celebrating with an ugly t-shirt. This is the 7th year I’ve participated. I’d have started sooner, but no one told me. Actually, I heard about it too late to play in 2001, but ran a local one of my own in the spring of 2002, so this is sortof my eighth go. I’ve also attempted to write novels in 30 days or less on several other occasions since 2002, so it’s more of baker’s dozen times I’ve faced down this challenge.

Officially, for attempts in Novembers, I’ve only “won” three times. 2002, 2003, and 2004. That’s Lost and Not Found, Dragons’ Truth, and UTFBF, Book 1, respectively. 2005 was a big fail, 2006 was practically a mental breakdown, and 2007 was a sort of emotional cleansing that ended in my getting married on December 1st. So this year (and from now on) the TGIO party is also my wedding anniversary. (I’ll have to remember not to confuse the sentiment of “Thank Goodness It’s Over” with thoughts about my marriage, though – it should be relief/joy that one thing is ending coupled with relief/joy that that other is continuing.)

As I believe I’ve stated over and over again in various places (was one of them this place?), for NaNoWriMo this year I’m writing a collection of short stories instead of a novel. At least, that’s the idea. That was, incidentally, the idea for 2005 and 2006 as well – and those didn’t turn out well. (Though I do have the several short stories I’d managed to complete those years on my HDD somewhere, just waiting for something to do.) The stories are all supposed to tie in to and expand upon the fiction and world of the novel I wrote this year, which I’m currently calling Forget What You Can’t Remember, which I can then sell as a companion book to the novel -expect both to be available in December- and which I’m thinking of calling More Lost Memories. On one hand, doing short stories makes things easier in a few ways: If I get stuck somewhere I can just switch to a different story. I can podcast the individual stories as they get finished without worrying that something I write later will contradict something already live. (The first story from More Lost Memories to hit the podcast is available now.) If one story or one set of characters runs out of steam before 50k words it’s no problem, because I can just start another one. Yay! On the other hand, I’ve never succeeded in writing a book-length collection of short stories. This will be the second attempt this year, and the sixth attempt in four years.

The collection of time-related short stories I was working on is close to okay, but it needs a good edit, and at least a couple more stories before it’s the size and scope I want from it. Problem is, I don’t currently have more ideas for time-related short stories. Hopefully I’ll come up with some in 2009. You can see four of the stories in their current state at modernevil.com/inProgress, and give me paragraph-level feedback on the text (I’m also using CommentPress over there) or general feedback on your impressions of the stories. The short story collection I started for NaNo’05 is less than 20% complete, on a story-level. I don’t know how long it is. I tried to throw one together last year, but it was a mess. I have one mapped out, outlined, characters developed, and barely half of one story written yet – that one I’ve been working on since 2003. The short story collection, so far, has eluded me. Hopefully that streak will end, now, and perhaps by this time next year I’ll have two or three such collections in print.

Anyway, so far I’m not doing great on my word count. The daily target, to hit the goal on time, is 1667 words. I’ve been writing between 750 and 1200 words a day, so far. Right now, my word count is only 5240. At midnight (almost 2 hours ago, now), it was supposed to be 8333 or more. The 860+ words in this post are definitely not in my novel’s word count. Neither are the words I’ve been posting in the NaNoWriMo regional forums. But I’m pretty sure they’re worthwhile. Just as I’m pretty sure podcasting my book-in-progress is worthwhile. And helping my brother try to get his car working is worthwhile. And the break I took to play the Mirror’s Edge demo, a little while ago, was pretty cool. There was that one jump that took me thirty or forty tries, but otherwise it was a lot of fun. Depending on how tomorrow goes, maybe between editing Friday’s Lost and Not Found podcast and helping my brother with his car I can get some writing in before the write-in at the library tomorrow night. Maybe I can catch up to where I’m supposed to be.

If all else fails, in a couple of weeks I’ll start a new novel -a proper novel- and get it written by the end of the month, anyway. Actually try to do NaNoWriMo right for a change.

Modern Evil Podcast

So, in addition to posting the audio version of Lost and Not Found on Podiobooks.com (coming soon), I’ve decided to start my own podcast feed for Modern Evil Press. This feed will update at least once a week with the latest episode of a novel (beginning with Lost and Not Found), and I hope also to update it mid-week with something else. The ‘something else’ would be shorter, perhaps a poem from one of the Worth 1k books, a short story, or a preview of a work-in-progress. If you want “pure” feeds for the novels, definitely go to Podiobooks.com and subscribe to the ones you want, but if you want to have a taste of everything we (which means me, it’s a one-man-publishing-company) have to offer at Modern Evil Press, the Modern Evil Podcast is the way to go.

Point your “Podcatcher” (ie: iTunes, for most people) to: http://modernevil.com/Podcast/?feed=podcast

Incidentally, I simultaneously added a “news feed” to modernevil.com, where I’ll try to post things like the upcoming Art Walk at Intatto Coffee (9/27/08) … so there’s relevant information there beyond book descriptions and sales pitches.

Lost and Not Found audiobook, coming soon

I’ve been working on various aspects of this project throughout the month of August, and there is yet quite a lot of work to be done before the project is complete, but it is complete enough to begin putting it out there for the world to see (by which I mean hear). Tonight I submitted the first episode of the Lost and Not Found audiobook to Podiobooks.com. I am assured that their queue is not too long right now, so it should go up there … well, relatively soon. Maybe next week, but certainly within September. *cough* I hope to have everything in place to start my own podcast/feed of my audiobooks by the end of this week, at modernevil.com.

The podiobooks.com feed will be strictly the book by itself, same as for Dragons’ Truth. The Modern Evil Press podcast (Should that be just “Modern Evil Podcast”, or “Modern Evil Press Podcast”? Hrm…) will also include short stories and future audiobooks (including the followup novel to Lost and Not Found I am currently writing) as well as a small amount of “chatter” and promos for other podcasts / podiobooks I want to spread the word about. It should be an ongoing / continuous podcast, going forward. bleh.

I never really wanted to do a podcast of my own (though I did try my hand at audio blogging now and again, long before podcasts became popular, and it recently occurred to me that I was doing a sort-of podiobook back in 2001, when I “released” a serialized audiobook as I was recording it, week by week sending out installments… by snail mail, rather than the as-yet-uninvented RSS), so I’m not sure how much “chatter” I’ll actually be doing, but at least some more information and advertisement than in the 20-second intro/outro I did for the podiobooks.com version. At least to remind people that there are paper versions of the books available, and perhaps updates on what else I’m working on that week, instead of just saying “see modernevil.com for more info…”

I’ve never been much good at maintaining regular content-update schedules, so we’ll just have to wait and see how things go with the podcasts. I’ve got 5 episodes of Lost and Not Found recorded and -nearly- ready for upload. I can record/edit/mix roughly an episode a day at this point (since I’ve done most of the music and planning work in advance… though my crazy plans require a certain amount more work on the music for a few future episodes… you’ll have to wait and listen to find out what I mean), and I expect there to be in the vicinity of 15 episodes total, so even without working on it every day, I should still be a couple of months ahead before my birthday rolls around, which will make things easier in that regard.

Anyway, along with the podcast, I plan to be adding a proper sort of “news feed” to modernevil.com (and to wretchedcreature.com as well) with updates on things like the next Art Walk at Intatto Coffee (September 27th! Come and see my latest art, and get books signed!) or… well, I’ll probably go do the Phoenix Art Walk October 3rd, as well. And I need to throw together a website specifically for Lost and Not Found, like I did for Dragons’ Truth … except I need to let people know this one exists, rather than putting it up late and not really linking to it. I own lostandnotfound.com already. In fact, I’ve put a couple of media files there, already: Listen to a “five minute” preview of the Lost and Not Found audiobook, or grab the 60-second promo for Lost and Not Found to share with your friends/blog-readers/podcast-listeners/pets/self/et cetera.

That’s it for now… getting sleepy. Been up (and working) since before 7AM. Mostly on the audiobook. Forgot (slash was too busy for) to paint, today. In the middle of at least 4 new paintings, and have another I need to photograph & get online… Exciting stuff. And did I mention I’m over halfway through the new novel? I’m sure that’ll take up some of the days I’m not recording & editing audio between now and forever… So, lots of stuff in the works, I hope you tune in, and I’ll try to post again soon.