crimsonaardvark-deactivated2018 asked: Hello! I really love The Northern Caves (re-read it this weekend), and I have a question regarding the personality and image of Leonard Salby: was the concept of this character influenced, in any way or form, by Henry Darger? It's not that I feel that there are direct similarities between the two, but as I was re-reading chapter 10, I was almost randomly struck by a 'huh, I wonder if the author is interested in Henry Darger' feeling. Apologies if this has already been asked.
I’m definitely interested in Henry Darger! (Here’s an old, long post of mine about John MacGregor’s book on Darger. N.B. some of the opinions there are out of date and I was a worse writer in 2011 than I am now.)
I didn’t consciously have Darger in mind when writing TNC, although now that I think about it there are some obvious similarities (isolated and frustrated man, long strange text). My earlier novel Floornight has some elements that were consciously influenced by Darger, BTW.
Notecard fanart 2: a scene that takes place towards the end of book 1 of Floornight by Rob Nostalgebraist (who resists @ing), which is a weird sci-fi that I’m really enjoying. I don’t think this spoils anything by the virtue of this scene coming mostly out of left field. Mostly I just wanted to draw Ratio pelvic thrusting at a really inappropriate time.
coriolisunset asked: Would you be ok with your work being translated into other languages? I'd like to translate the first few chapters of Floornight to Italian as a pet project and I wanted to ask your permission; they would of course be freely available on some site akin to ao3 and credited properly to you
Sure, no problem. Link me to it when it’s up!
coriolisunset asked: I'm reading Floornight again and I just noticed that, in chapter 19, Estragon prepares the girl by programming her to have "familial affection" towards him; I was wondering, is this supposed to parallel James posing as Kyle's uncle or am I just reading too much into stuff?
Not sure there’s such a thing as reading too much into stuff! :) But no, that wasn’t something I consciously had in mind. Just a detail about how Estragon and co.’s psychological torture worked.
starlightvero asked: Hey, so I read Floornight, and like, I'm seriously freaking impressed. I knew it wouldn't be garbage, cuz enough people liked it. But still, I was expecting a "friend's fic" level of quality. Nope. First rate. Loved it. Totes solid. Amaze.
:D
Thank you!!
Finished Floornight, liked it, made a book cover for it.
“The viewscreen shows nothing, only the void that is human-visible Maxwell Light down at 4 km. Maria can only see her hands in front of her thanks to the dim, candy-colored lights on the control panel. The atmosphere resembles that created by driving a car in the middle of the night. She thinks this every time, although it ceased to have meaning years ago. A stock memory.”
trying out a floornight audiobook
I should be working today, but my mind isn’t quite in the zone yet and I decided to try something fun/creative instead. So I recorded myself reading the first two chapters of Floornight. You can listen to them here.
I’d love to do the whole thing as an audiobook, and TNC too (although TNC will present some format translation issues, obviously). Before I actually go any further, I’d like to see what people think of these test chapters.
- Does my voice work? Given both the inherent qualities of my voice and the style in which I chose to read, are these chapters pleasant to listen to? Would you feel natural listening to them in whatever way you usually listen to audiobooks (possibly while going to sleep, or driving, etc.)? Are there vocal choices (speed, enunciation, etc.) I should be making differently?
- Is the recording quality good enough? I’m just using my laptop microphone.
- In sum, would you be interested in listening to more of this? (Either if you’ve read Floornight before, or if you haven’t. In the latter case, note that the story gets more interesting in the next few chapters.)
it works pretty well for the most part! it’s a good reading voice, it’s just a little too consistent sometimes- like, when you read off Maria’s litany, it sounded more like a lecturer giving instructions for the first time than a familiar, structured mantra pregnant with religious weight? or at “enemy fire! multiplicity! thousands and millions of-”, it didn’t feel surprising or intense compared to the surrounding stuff.
like, the temptation is to let the text speak for itself, but in audio you’re in the position of filling in for the reader’s internal voice, which usually interprets tone automatically- so there’s this extra invisible component of the text that you have to keep track of, and focusing on the text trades off against that.
i don’t know what your workflow is like, but if you’re going to do more, i recommend doing a cold read first- just go through without recording real quick, don’t worry about making mistakes in the reading. what that does (i’m mainly regurgitating advice from a high-school drama teacher here) is let you figure out how you want to say stuff, where to punch it up and put emphasis and modulate your tone- so that when you go through and focus on getting the script right, you’ve got all the performance stuff cached in like, vocal reflex, so you can focus on avoiding mistakes without trading off against the other elements of the performance
(and uh- i just wrote three paragraphs of criticism there, but that really isn’t representative of my opinion in general, which is that it was great! like, i’ve been listening to the worm audiobook, which is really hit or miss with all the different voice actors, and your voice works better than the majority of those. the miranda chapter was especially good- you really nailed that bored, conversational tone there. it’s just that nitpicking tends to produce more words than praise.)
Thanks for the feedback!
Doing a cold reading first sounds like a very good idea.
About the consistency of the vocal tone, I was actively aiming for that, on the model of other audiobooks I’ve heard, where the tone of voice modulates a bit but never gets especially “intense” or “dramatic.” The voice may become faster-paced in tense sections, or develop a note of anxiety, etc., but won’t actually try to fully express the emotions inherent in any strongly emotional passage. This is one of the things that I think of as differentiating an audiobook from a “dramatic reading” (where, say, Let’s Read Homestuck is an example of the latter).
To use a loose musical analogy, the audiobook reader will adopt general features of a piece (i.e. chapter) like “major key vs. minor key,” but won’t at all try to reproduce the piece itself. A very sad chapter will be read in an appropriately downbeat tone (within the small range of variation the reader allows themselves) but won’t sound like a sad person, just like a person reading a book while a light garnish of sadness added.
It’s possible that I haven’t heard enough audiobooks to know what the standards of the form actually are (I haven’t heard many audiobooks at all), but the above is what I’m deliberately aiming for.
(via itsbenedict)
trying out a floornight audiobook
I should be working today, but my mind isn’t quite in the zone yet and I decided to try something fun/creative instead. So I recorded myself reading the first two chapters of Floornight. You can listen to them here.
I’d love to do the whole thing as an audiobook, and TNC too (although TNC will present some format translation issues, obviously). Before I actually go any further, I’d like to see what people think of these test chapters.
- Does my voice work? Given both the inherent qualities of my voice and the style in which I chose to read, are these chapters pleasant to listen to? Would you feel natural listening to them in whatever way you usually listen to audiobooks (possibly while going to sleep, or driving, etc.)? Are there vocal choices (speed, enunciation, etc.) I should be making differently?
- Is the recording quality good enough? I’m just using my laptop microphone.
- In sum, would you be interested in listening to more of this? (Either if you’ve read Floornight before, or if you haven’t. In the latter case, note that the story gets more interesting in the next few chapters.)
not an audiobook fan, so i’m probably not actually the audience. i’d probably rather read the text, but having read it i’m enjoying the recording.
quality is surprisingly good for a laptop mic. you speak and enunciate very clearly, and my goodness that’s a win. the invented tech jargon is difficult to pick up first time through, though i can’t think of an easy workaround for that.
i have no attention span, so the chapters being short works as well here as it does for the text.
you sound a bit too much like you’re reading something out. i’m probably spoiled by the only audiobook i’ve ever liked being christopher hitchens’ reading of his own “god is not great”, though that book’s a great big ranty polemic, hitchens was a great big ranty polemicist and it didn’t say anything he hadn’t said elsewhere, so my expectations may not be realistic here.
i would be interested to know what someone who hasn’t read “floornight” makes of it.
(and psst: “liam” is “lee-am”, not “lye-am”)
Thanks for the feedback. The jargon’s going to be tough in audio, yeah, and I’m not sure there’s any workaround for that.
One of the things you will discover if I continue doing this is how many words I’ll happily use in text but don’t know how to pronounce :)
(”Liam” is a prominent enough name – at least thanks to Liam Neeson – that I really ought to know how it’s pronounced … but then, I have weird gaps when it comes to words. A few weeks ago Esther asked me to massage her heel and I actually could not remember which part of the foot the heel was. Or, on another recent day, I was so groggy after waking up that I was having trouble speaking, and couldn’t remember the word “water” so I could tell Esther which of two cups I wanted her to hand me … but I was still able to summon the word “aphasia” to describe my condition. Go figure)
I think the reason it sounds like I’m “reading something out” is that I find I have to pay very close attention to the written text while reading, so I don’t make mistakes. I made two mistakes in the recording of Ch. 2 and was able to pause, edit them out, and resume, but it’s a tedious process I want to avoid if possible, so I keep thinking “focus on the page … make sure you get the next phrase just right … .” (I wonder how professional audiobook readers deal with this? Maybe it just takes practice.)
(via reddragdiva)