An alternative to reading is listening, and a different approach to finding publishers for your science fiction novels is to create audio podcasts. My friend in Ireland, Gary Hicks, has been creating marvelous audio experiences out of his Terra Incognita novels, and he’s persuaded me to have a go too.

I’ve already had a bash at reading one of my novels to a microphone. The gifted playwright and actor, Donna Gagnon, and her man, Doug, helped me read my humour thriller Escaping Reality to CD, (the novel is here) but we bungled on the sound quality. So this time I thought I’d aim for shorter stories and picked the anthology of science fiction stories written by Robert Blevins and myself in Dimensions (here but scroll down to find Dimensions). My favourite one I wrote is Prime Meridian, the story of grape-sized meteorites that hit a London house, one a day, every day… I had great fun in the research and writing. I gargled, printed the story in size 14, prepared my microphone, gargled again, and having turned on the software – I used Goldwave, but also have Audacity – I started reading. After 5 minutes, the phone rang. Grrrr. So, I told the re-mortgage salesman to re-mortgage himself and took the phone off the hook. I turned the heating off in case gurgling in the pipes made like the sound effects of my stomach. I finally finished the reading, and played it back. Umm, rather scratchy and quiet. I fiddled with the Goldwave software and made it worse. I yelled Help to Gary, and he put me in touch with his sound engineer friend, Martyn Lycett, a genius of the electronic sound waves. After writing him a PayPal sub he magicked my Prime Meridian into a better-than-I-hoped-for sound. I haven’t had the time to play with the editing but Gary added a musical intro after asking me to select appropriate sounds, edited the ID tags and voila a story to behold. I am subbing it to Podiobooks but they need at least four more stories to be read from Dimensions before it goes on site. In the meantime you can listen freely to Prime Meridian listen here be prepared to wait for the download.

I’ve taken advice from Gary and Martyn and so I have ordered a decent microphone so I shouldn’t need to pay for extra audio editing for the other stories. I’ll still need help from Gary with the tidying up and sounds though… cheers mate!

 Gary Hicks Terra Incognita is on PodioBooks.com here

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