This will be the final podcast for the week, as I will be fairly busy until Sunday night. This piece is approximately 30 minutes long, and can be listened to through the player, or by downloading the file. This third segment of Tale of the Apprentice covers Tarranau’s decision to stay or go, and his actions afterward.
Here is the second segment of the Tale of the Apprentice. It’s approximately 25 minutes long, and it covers Magister Gothren’s accusation of Tarranau. I’ll have the next piece in a few days, about the same length.
For authors who haven’t done podcasting before, I highly recommend it, because it reading the work out loud shows where various bits are fiddly or don’t quite work right. For instance, for me tonight, there was a several page section that was a detour from the main plot of the story, and given it was only a few pages into the book, that wasn’t acceptable, and it was causing the story to jar and jam and feel a little out of sorts. So, it’s been chopped and reduced to a single sentence. It’s the kind of thing that crops up when doing the podcast, and it certainly helps with the editing. I’m using the podcasting as a sort of final pass through the novel, because even though I think it’s good enough to be published and I’m trying to do that, it doesn’t stop me from coming back and working on it again and again, because I know that the first chapter is the weakest one of the seven, and so I try to clean it up and make it better whenever I can.
26
Mar
Here is the first part of Tale of the Apprentice for your listening pleasure. This is the same as the prior posting of the podcast, but using updated software to do it. The old posting has been taken down to save space.
24
Mar
Despite all appearances to the contrary, I’m not quite as dead as I seem to be. I’ve simply been caught in the grinder that is business school, and that combined with spring break has kept me well away from writing or, indeed, doing much of any work on the book or the website. However, I’ve managed to rectify that somewhat in the last few days, and have begun using the Twitter feed again, as well as prodding at the back-end of the website and a few other off-record items.
Update: See the next post in line
I do have one new piece of work I would like to share: a podcast of the first part of Tale of the Apprentice, the first chapter in Tarranau. It’s a bit of a sample piece, and about twenty minutes long. I’d greatly appreciate feedback, and comments on how to improve the work. I’m working on the second one for this weekend, and it will likely be another twenty to thirty minutes. The plan is to have at least one of these posted each week, until the book is finally completed, some frightening time far off in the future.
Now, a little as to the method for podcasting (I’ve also mentioned this in a shorter format on the Twitter feed). First, I use Audacity, along with the LAME MP3 Encoder (it’s all at that link). Downloaded, installed, and plugged in with a decent headset/microphone combination. Use in a noise free environment, and simply hit record, then start talking. Don’t worry about volume, but do attempt to speak clearly. Any time there’s a mistake, stop the recording, play it back to hear the mistake, and then select the several seconds (that’s almost always all it is) that contain the error, delete them, and start recording again. It’s a very easy process to correct mistakes. Once you’re done with the entire piece, listen to it one more time to make sure there’s no mistakes, and then export to MP3. Upload the MP3 and it’s done. Now, I save my audio files in the Audacity format, just in case I ever want to combine or edit them again.
There’s a few other things I would recommend – introduce yourself and the work at the beginning of each piece, and, if possible, have a little theme music or some style that sits at the beginning of the work, before you start talking. However, I haven’t done this yet, and may not do so for a little bit. I hope this helps, and I hope you enjoy the podcast.