Friday, May 8, 2020

So I Made a Thing


Powers Beyond Their Steam image
I freely admit I'm not very good at logos.

When the Stay at Home orders started spreading and public schools were being closed around the country I wanted to do... something.  I thought about this and decided that one of the things I learned about myself when I was a children's librarian at two elementary schools was that I read picture/kids books pretty danged well.

I collected all of my picture/kids books and cleaned up an area in my room so I could have a reasonable space to video myself reading.

Then I read where my Writer's Loft friend, Josh Funk was having to ask permission of his publisher to read some of his own books online.  Then LeVar Burton posted to Instagram, lamenting that he couldn't bring back Reading Rainbow to read to kids during these Interesting Times due to copyright restrictions.

Burton, being Reading Rainbow Famous, managed to quickly get permission from Neil Gaiman and several publishers.  Me, I'm just a former librarian who would quickly accumulate Cease and Desist orders and whose videos would be stricken from YouTube for copyright infringement.

After about a week it occurred to me that there is one book that I do have full rights over.  It's the book I started this blog for, the book that got me an agent but was Friendzoned into obscurity by publishing houses that all Liked but didn't Love it.

I dusted off the manuscript and tried videoing myself reading the first few chapters.

Yeah.  So.

Then I switched over to just recording the audio for the chapters.  That went much better.  So much better that after recording the first nine chapters I've started posting them as a free, serialized podcast through podbean.

They can be found through:

iTunes Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean 


Please feel free to listen and leave comments.  I'd love to know what you think of the story, the characters, and my embarrassing British accents.


-- Tom










No comments:

Post a Comment