14 Masks

Well it´s still not clean, but I did dig a bit into the junk on my desk today. 

I dropped the lid to my coffee cup, but I didn´t see it on the empty floor and it wasn´t in the bag next to my chair. I´m sure it fell down, but not seeing it I figured it must still be on the desk somewhere.

I went to put up the lidless cup first and happily discovered that the lid to another cup of a different brand happens to fit it perfectly.

I still wanted to do something to lessen the mess on the desk, though. I´m not sure I´ve ever cleaned it off.

Right at the top I found a collection of masks I have gotten over the last year or so. 14 that I counted. 

I found junk mail from 2018 and 2019 to get rid of, and a few letters worth keeping. There is the invitation to my cousin´s wedding a little more than a month away. Birthday cards from my step-mother and grandmother. The handout from my grandfather´s memorial service. A card from my step-mother´s mother who died just before Covid became a thing, and a card from my other grandfather who´s been dead awhile. My father found that a few months ago when he was cleaning his desk (seems I can claim to have inherited desk messiness :P)

Still no clue where the coffee lid is, desk still basically a mess (not my fault, the 6 or more stuffed animals I can see here must be responsible) but I did finish editing the bit of audiobook I  had to work on today before the desk cleaning attempt happened.

Benjamin Jones: The Call of The Shaman by Asa Rodriguez

 The audiobook for Benjamin Jones: The Call of The Shaman written and narrated by Asa Rodriguez is now on Audible and Apple Books-audio.

Gaslit by a Madman: Illuminated Poems

 

Gaslit by a Madman: Illuminated Poems written and narrated by Max Lewy is now available on Audible

It is the first audiobook that I've produced using someone else's voice.

New Website - Making Audiobooks

For the last month or so I've been tuning into a daily periscope show I found on Twitter. It's mostly political complaints from Majid M Padellan in New York, or as he calls himself 'Brooklyn Dad Defiant'. And yes I agree with a lot of his views, but this blog isn't really about that.

Mr. Padellan has a fun clever picture book where he tries to explain the current happenings in Washington as a laughable manner. He tends to do a live reading of a page or two every weekday around 5:00pm cst. (OK, I'm sure it's supposed to be 6:00pm est., but I'm watching in Texas)

Now recently, I've been auditioning to read audiobooks but with all of this Corona Virus craziness some people are just not getting back to me about what I've tried out for. Leaves me a lot work I supposedly said I could do with no actual word about if the writers want me to get it done or not.

It has gotten to the point, I've just stopped auditioning for new ones because if somehow I got chosen for all of them I couldn't get the work done in any reasonable amount of time.

So to amuse myself I started taking apart Brooklyn Dad's periscope videos to make an audiobook of his book. I've told him about it, and he's not mad. Says he's prefer to get audio from Hillary Clinton or some celebrity for the official audiobook. I've stopped my audio work on it, have 11-12 pages out of 44.

But I have offered to work on the .mp3's if he can get the audio he wants for it. And so this weekend I put together a website for making audiobooks: Noesis Books. I chose the name as a joke to myself because Noesis is what the mad scientist Nigel Hunter from a couple of my self published books called his company. Putting together files of another person's voice is enjoyable.

It all goes back to The Stand

Today I've been editing the sound files for the audiobook version of my short story If You Believe in Love At First Sight. Got to thinking that it was somewhat ironic that this was the book of mine I'm working with right now. Mainly because a lot of it came about from my love of The Stand.

If you don't know, The Stand is an awesome Stephen King book about the world falling apart in the face of a terrible plague. It Is where I fell in love with the evil character Randal Flagg years before I ever heard of The Dark Tower. Now my story is nothing like any Stephen King book I've read so I can't claim my books are any fair comparison.

It's just that when I first wrote The Speed of Darkness I had recently read The Stand, and so the idea of setting my story in Nevada amused me. now The Speed of Darkness is the name I've given my convoluted werewolf series because it somewhat describes the super-power my nerdy hero Nigel Hunter controls. You can read about him and the start of the series in The Illumination Query

If You Believe in Love At First Sight Is surely nothing like The Stand, it's actually quite short. I don't have much of The Speed of Darkness written down, but my idea for the fourth book (I do plan to write them all eventually) somewhat came from my other favorite character from The Stand, Larry Underwood. Rereading The Stand not long ago made me decide that my series needed a musician, and my character Joel Shine was born.

New Microphone

I actually have a little USB microphone connected to my Chromebook now. I was in the middle of editing the files for the audiobook I'm working on now (The World Beneath Trilogy by Rebecka Georgia) and I guess my Chromebook 11 is a couple years old now, the internal mic went out. And trying to record on my cell phone does not give the same sound quality.

Like werewolves? And free books...

Just thought I'd give you a heads up... Christopher D Schmitz Is giving away the Kindle copy of his book, Wolf of the Tesseract for free through Friday the 22!