Not too long ago I asked a question or two over on the Facebook Fan Page about interest in and thoughts about a potential Book of Deacon audio book. The consensus was that if I were to do it, I should pursue a pair of narrators (one male and one female), but overall there wasn’t a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the project. Since I’ve got a lot of writing to do, I decided that I probably shouldn’t devote too much time to a major project like that. That said, I was still curious about how the process of doing an audio book would happen. A bit of research turned up www.acx.com. For those of you who don’t know, ACX is like a big “help wanted”/”looking for work” site for authors and narrators. As an author, you select your book, make some decisions about how you would want to handle payment, choice of narrator, etc, and then put it up for the world to see. As a narrator/producer, you look at the available books and see what projects you think you would be right for. Eventually, if all goes well, narrator and author get in touch, things are hammered out, and the book is made. It seemed like a neat idea, so I started to look into it.
Now, as with anything, there is the potential for legal and financial complications. Rather than risk screwing things up with The Book of Deacon Trilogy, I decided to put Jade up for bid. It is short, related but not central to the series, and not currently entrenched with foreign dealings. Seemed like a reasonably safe way to see how the site works, and if perhaps the trilogy might one day find a home there. The page for Jade can be found here.
In other news, the site has gotten a minor face lift, mostly in the artwork sections, to help navigate to areas of interest faster. Basically it is just a table of contents at the top of pages with a whole bunch of sections, but I think it will be handy. You go ahead and choose “Official Artwork” from the artwork menu and marvel at the ease of jumping down to “Commissioned Character Art”. Oh, and while you’re there, you can look at the latest addition to my art gallery, a character reference sheet for Calypso, the mermaid from Entwell, drawn by the prolific CatseaTheDevil. Why would I commission a picture of such a minor character? Hmm. Why indeed… Hey, anyone ever wonder what my phone screen looks like during my commute?
Kind of like that, actually. Yeah, the trappings of an Entwell story are starting to come together, and I add a paragraph or two whenever I’m away from the PC for a while, and thus unable to work on Lain Origin. Good news on that one, by the way. I’ve just written the most terrible moment in his life, which means I can finally move on to happier things for him.
Let’s see. Any other things knocking around in my head that I should ask about? … Well, there’s this, I suppose. Something you’ll hear me mention every now and then is “The Unnamed Second Trilogy” or “Trilogy 2”. Some of you may be familiar, but for the rest of you, this is a planned series of books that follows long after Jade and features an almost entirely new cast. I’ve actually written a whole book of it, but it is just sitting on the shelf. Why? Because there is ONE character who I feel ruins the whole story, and my friends are split on whether or not they agree with me. I was thinking of putting up a sneak peek, but it seems cruel because this is a book that is on indefinite hiatus. I’d discuss the issue with you good folks, but then I’d be giving away plot points that would ruin the story for you. Still not sure how to deal with it. Any thoughts?