Article and Interview by Dave Thompson

For the general public, Tim Pratt is one of the best kept secrets in fantasy fiction. I say this not just as someone who loves to read (and listen!) to Tim’s work, but as someone who who has bought his stories to be featured at PodCastle, a podcast run by Anna Scwhind and myself. Tim creates interesting characters who always feel real, and typically puts them in a world similar to ours, with several very subtle differences. At a young age, Tim discovered he could entertain himself with his own writing, and has never stopped, becoming quite prolific. He’s written and sold over a hundred short stories (it wouldn’t surprise me if by the time this is posted, it’ll be 200), and has written fifteen novels, including the Marla Mason books (as T.A. Pratt), and The Constantine Affliction as T. Aaron Payton.

A year ago, I got to read Tim Pratt’s incredible contemporary fantasy fiction novel Briarpatch. As soon as I started reading it, I completely fell in love. Also, I knew it was a story that my voice was a good fit for. I’d been curious about taking a shot at reading audiobooks for a couple years now, so I emailed Tim and asked him if there were any plans for an audiobook. This … maybe isn’t the best way to go about becoming an audiobook narrator. But I knew Tim and felt comfortable asking him, and I felt comfortable that if he didn’t like the idea, he’d tell me.

And so, this past summer, I spent just about every free moment I had recording Tim’s amazing book. (The recording process could probably be a whole other post.) [Editor’s note: Why yes, Dave, it could be a whole other post. Thanks for volunteering.] We used ACX, which was very easy to work with. When I turned everything in, I kept waiting for Tim to tell me that he wanted me to do something different (maybe even the whole thing). Instead, he told me how happy he was with it, and how much he liked some of the character voices. (Dave’s note: I am not Roy Dotrice or Jim Dale. I have a very minimalistic approach to reading, which is part of why I knew I could read this one.)

And now, the book is out! It’s even got a review! A positive one! People have bought it! Yay! I feel pretty lucky, to be completely honest, to have recorded Briarpatch at all, let alone as my first audiobook.

When I told Sam about all this, he suggested I interview myself about the process. Luckily, thus far, he’s settled for me interviewing author Tim Pratt, who is decidedly more interesting!

INTERVIEW:

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REVIEW and INTERVIEW: The Witches of Lublin By Ellen Kushner, Elizabeth Schwartz, and Yale Strom, Narrated by Ellen Kushner, Miriam Margolyes, Neil Gaiman, Simon Jones, and Barbara Rosenblat for SueMedia Productions:

Review and Interview by Dave Thompson: “Music Bridging our Profane World to the Holiness of the World to Come”

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Today I’m absolutely ecstatic to post my interview with bestselling author Brandon Sanderson:

I first met and spoke to Sanderson in September 2010, when he came to Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books for a reading and signing event for The Way of Kings: Book One of The Stormlight Archive, and one of the topics we got onto happened to be audiobooks. Fast forward to the fall of 2011 and the release of The Alloy of Law: A Mistborn Novel (which I reviewed here on the Audible SF/F blog) and it felt like it was time to dig a little deeper on the subject of audiobooks, narrator Michael Kramer, and (maybe) see about poking around on the ending to the Wheel of Time, due out in January 2013.

Q: Last time we spoke, we were talking about the 45-hour audiobook for The Way of Kings. Each of the Mistborn books came in at 25-30 hours, but The Alloy of Law comes in at a tidy 9 discs. Did you set out to write a shorter book?

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For the second Interview Monday of 2012, I’m very happy to welcome narrator Gayle Hendrix to talk about Stellarnet Rebel, the debut novel by J.L. Hilton released last week in e-book and audiobook by Harlequin e-imprint Carina Press. Stellarnet Rebel sees newsblogger Genny O’Riordan arrive on “Asteria, a corporate-owned deep-space colony populated by refugees, criminals, and obsessed online gamers”.

There she meets Duin, an alien speaking out against the invasion of his homeworld by the insect-like Tikati, and one blog post later they’re in the middle of a “dangerous web of passion and politics”. Throughout, Hendrix ably handles the dual linguistic challenges of alien languages on the one hand and leetspeak and gamer lingo on the other, and I’m very happy to have her here on the blog.

Q: Gayle, thanks so much for joining me to talk about Stellarnet Rebel.

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Welcome to 2012! I’m hoping to provide an interview every Monday this year, ranging from authors, to narrators, editors, engineers, reviewers, and more.

To start this series off I couldn’t think of a better interviewee than Bob Reiss, one of the best audiobooks reviewers around at his blog The Guilded Earlobe, which I’ve followed since stumbling onto it last summer.

Q: I was thinking about setting a goal to do 52 (some short!) interviews in 2012, whether it’s authors, narrators, reviewers, whatever. And I thought who better to start with than you? Your blog has been just AWESOME to follow.

First off, before the questioning begins, I would like to thank Sam for all he does here at Audible SF/F. Anyone who is a fan of speculative fiction and audiobooks needs to check this blog. 2011 was a great blogging year for me, based a lot on the many wonderful people I have had the chance to interact with, and Sam has been a great supporter of my blog, and an asset to the community. 

 Q: How long have you been listening to audiobooks?

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Award-winning Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer is not just the author of a long list of audiobooks (from FlashForward, from which the recent television series was adapted, to his Neanderthal Parallax series Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids, to his most recent series, WWW: Wake, Watch, and Wonder, and several standalone novels besides) he’s also a great fan of audiobooks and of Audible.com, having been a member for over ten years. He’s also narrated several introduction to classic science fiction audiobooks, which is where I first heard his voice. The first story of his I “read” also came via audiobook, that being his excellent short story “You See, But You Do Not Observe” in the John Joseph Adams-edited anthology The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and since then I’ve also enjoyed his WWW series:

Recently, Sawyer announced that four more of his novels would be coming to audiobook:

Yay, Audible.com! Just sold Audible audiobook rights to four more of my novels: the Hugo Award-nominated and Seiun Award-winning Frameshift, the Hugo Award-nominated Factoring Humanity, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winning Mindscan, and the Seiun Award-winning Illegal Alien.

Combining this announcement with the knowledge that his next novel, Triggers, was coming soon, I wrote Sawyer and asked him about the audiobook announcement, his favorite audiobooks, and more.

Q: What can you tell us about the new audiobook deal?

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Saladin Ahmed broke the news on Twitter last Thursday, retweeted by his publisher DAW Books, that Brilliance Audio had purchased the audio rights to his debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon (hardcover, Feb 7, 2012):

And a day later, Ahmed posted the first chapter of the novel on his blog. As a fan both of Ahmed’s short fiction (which I’ve enjoyed catching at PodCastle, and which garnered him enough votes to be a finalist for both a Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer) and of Brilliance Audio (who, it must be noted, sends me review copies quite promptly and nicely) I wanted to find out a bit more about Ahmed’s thoughts on an audiobook for his novel. So I asked the him a few questions. And he answered. Hooray!

Q: Not that authors generally get to pick, but is there a “dream narrator” (or two) that come to mind when you think about the right voices and characters for your book?

Well, the novel has several POVs - old people, young people, men, women, quasi-Arabs, quasi-Africans… Later books, which reveal more of the world, will feature quasi-Europeans as well. So ideally I’d love a full cast.

But that pretty much never happens. And whoever narrates is going to have the challenge of doing a convincing job with quasi-Arabic pronunciations. So if I could pick just one ‘dream narrator’…probably Tony Shalhoub. I’ve heard him do imitations of his Lebanese relatives, and they’re pretty close to my own voice for my main character, Adoulla.

Q: When writing (and re-writing, and revising, and editing, and…) Throne of the Crescent Moon, did any of the characters start to develop their own voices in your head, particular accents, etc.?

Absolutely. I’ve always  been a ‘funny voices’ guy. When I read my work at conventions I ‘do voices’ and - if I can toot my own horn here - usually get praise for giving an entertaining reading. If audiobook narration didn’t involve a host of skills other than just being a good vocal performer, I’d be begging Brilliance to record the book myself.

Q: From announcing the book’s sale to DAW, to unveiling the cover, to last week’s audiobook announcement, things seem to be going very well. As a debut author, albeit one with a good amount of professional experience, how do you keep your expectations in check… or do you?

I’m a guy who fantasizes. A lot. And not just when I’m writing. Whatever preposterously unlikely ‘making it big’ scenario you can imagine, I’ve lived it in my head a dozen times already. For me it’s a matter of keeping absurd fantasy from becoming serious expectation.

UPDATE, 5 DEC 2011: Publishers Weekly has published a starred review of Throne of the Crescent Moon.