Pretty Packaging (part 1) . . .

Sorry for the picture-heavy post today, but this has been a long-time in coming;) I promised to post on the packaging for my audiobook, but I wanted to wait until a few people had the thing in their hands, so I didn't completely spoil the surprise for everyone!

Yeah, I went overboard on the details, but it was fun;)

                                  

I started with a paper mache book box; you've probably seen their decorated cousins in stores, usually covered in generic designs with the Eiffel Tower or botanical prints. I found the blanks at my local craft store. The interior was just large enough for my 12-CD case with a little room for padding.

The inside cover then got old Union Pacific broadsides or schedules decopaged in. Each one had a slightly different page with quaint notices about train etiquette or what a ticket to Boise costs. Since a large part of the first section of the book deals with the protagonist on a train, I thought this was appropriate.

Then, the box side got a layer of batting glued in. Oh, hot glue gun, you're the best.

A layer of brown dupioni silk comes next, also glued along the edges so it fit snuggly to the bottom and was smooth and didn't shift around.The sides were tucked in and glued down then, and that was the cushioning for the CD case.

My "bookmark". Since the case fit pretty snug once its in there, I had to add something to lever it up out of the cushioning.

Here's the blank case sitting inside . . .

The most work went into this little folder. It doesn't look like much right now; just a kraft paper 4-fold petal envelope that I cut out from my own template and glued inside the cover. I added two brass brads to attach black string to, so I could band it closed. You'll see what's inside in a moment.

The finished CD case. that's the cover of the actual book, just reproduced for the outside of the case. The back has the listing of which chapter is on which disk.

Here's what you get when you open up the envelope inide the cover. I drew portraits of the main characters, scanned each one, used illustrator to turn them into vector images and then put them on a parchment backing. I then formatted them into this accordion insert. Technically, it's two pages that are glued down to look like one long insert.

On the other side, I included a feature that readers get in the actual book: the map of Outcast. I figured it might be useful once someone is listening to refer to the map and figure out where characters are.

I don't really have progress pics for the outside of the box yet; I was in a hurry when I was doing the last boxes, so I'll try to take pics when I make this batch and I'll post them then.

Stay tuned!

Extra-Credit . . .

via here

I did quite a bit of work on the packaging for my Outcast audiobook this weekend. There are going to be a lot of personalized touches in the packaging, artwork I did myself, handmade bits that tie into the story, and just all-around neat little details. If this were being distributed by a publishing house, it would get a glossy box and plastic shrink-wrap and they'd call it a day. I'm actually pretty glad I get to do this myself, though unfortunately I don't get to make any money off of the results;)

Let's hope the recipients like how it turns out . . .

Long and Winding Road . . .

I have often said that if there's a complicated, difficult way to accomplish something, I will usually pick that. I have a tendency to take a simple project and go the extra mile with it, and then throw on another mile just for kicks. These are never projects that end up making me money, of course; usually, I'll spend more money on these types of things than I ought to, getting a freakish reward out of doing something "right".

My latest potentially expensive project is the packaging of my audiobook for "Outcast". These are not CDs that I'm putting up for sale; I'm giving them to a few members of my family as gifts. I'm sure they would be perfectly happy with receiving a few envelopes with CDs in them, and call it a day. But, can I stomach doing that? Of course not. Instead, I'm planning to package the CDs in a ridiculously elaborate fashion, for no reason other than my own satisfaction at doing it.

Its at times like these that I figure I probably ought to stick my head in a bucket. But instead I'm going to forge ahead and produce something that will drive me crazy for the next month or so, until I get it right. I'll document with pictures of course, because, crazy always needs to be documented.

A Voice . . .

Principal recording for the "Outcast" audiobook was finished yesterday. You can't hear it, but that was a big sigh of relief I just let loose;)

Now that I'm on the other side of the experience, I can finally look back and reflect on what an undertaking it was. I'm not a professional VO artist, and while I had a good time recording my book, I'm not sure I would necessarily want to add VO to my repetoire. Even with the relative ease of reading my own words, which often eliminated potential errors in pronunciation and inflection, I still made numerous mistakes and did a lot of rerecording. If the chapter was particularly long or I decided, for schedule reasons, to record more than one chapter at a time, fatigue brought out even more errors. I can't even tell you the number of times I would simply stutter over a phrase, ruining a passage, or just plain read a sentence incorrectly so that it made no sense at all to the ear. Stop, cut section, rerecord. Each chapter took at least 45 minutes to record, sometimes much longer before I was satisfied. With 36 chapters, that represents more than a day's worth of recording.

A note about voices and dialects: good god, I did some questionable dialect work on this recording. Dialects are one of my specialties, and I'm usually pretty good at getting an accent to sound passably authentic. But, recording "Outcast" required me to snap very rapidly into and out of a lot of different accents, from Cockney to Deep South, to French to the twang of the West. And, in between, I had to snap back into my own voice, to read the narration. There were times I did this relatively well; Benjamin usually stays where he ought to be. There were other passages I struggled with, and overall I'm not terribly pleased with a lot of my dialect work on this recording. Poubelle in particular ranges all over the frigging map, her Cockney making it all the way to Australia by way of the South Bronx, stopping off in Canada a few times just for kicks. There was one day when I was particularly tired and feeling strung out, and I started to feel like all the characters were sounding like Jessie from "Toy Story". But, as much as I beat myself up for imprecision, I know my audience, made up of friends and family, probably won't wince too often, and will be far more forgiving than I.

All that being said, I'm still incredibly glad I decided to undertake this project. I started writing when I was in grade school, and one of my favorite teachers encouraged me not just to write, but let me read my stories aloud. I was already a burgeoning actor, and reading my own characters was exciting and incredibly fun. Now, years later, I remember that experience. The characters in "Outcast" are some of my favorite creations; I know I shouldn't show it, I should love all my characters equally, but damn if Jack, Ben, Jonah, Poubelle, Doc, and Jeremiah aren't some fantastic people I wouldn't mind hanging out with. And, there is something emotionally cathartic about taking characters I already care about deply and giving them a voice; they leap off the page now in a way they never did before. I could already hear them speak their words inside my head; it's kind of like letting everyone else inside my brain to hear what I hear when I'm writing something.

Now, I get to start burning CDs and putting together packaging. Next step: Holiday presents! I'm going to try to have a prototype done for when my sister visits at the end of the month, so I can send her home with hers. I'll take pics and post when I have them;)

The Ears Have It . . .

I started work on recording the audiobook for Outcast, and though I'm just a sliver of the way through--just four chapters recorded out of thirty-six--I have already learned a few things:

1. I swear I'm forgetting how to do accents, something I'm generally particularly good at.

2. Ten pages of text equals around thirty-five minutes of recording.

3. This project is going to eat up a lot of time, and a lot of CD's.

I'm breaking each chapter into sections, recording and then checking and then recording. It helps my voice not get too strained, and it's easier than taking long stretches of text. I don't have anything like profesional equipment and I'm not in a studio, so every loud sound gets picked up and means I have to stop and record over it. Then, there's the simple misreads or stutters; every once in a while, my brain just sees a word or phrase wrong and I have to rerecord that dialogue. It can get pretty exhausting, and I've got a long way to go.

Still, there's something really satisfying about setting my words down in my voice. I'm not a professional voiceover artist; I don't have the voice for that, my own being a little too high and nasal. but, it feels a little like having your own radio show, like telling your friends your story around a campfire. I became an actor to tell stories, because I liked performing my own work for an audience, and this feels a bit like that (even though right now it's just an audience of one).

If things progress, I should be able to have the audiobook ready for Christmas, and several of my friends will get a copy in their stockings. Yes, it's not the highest quality recording, but I still hope they like it.

On to the next chapter . . .

Drafted . . .

It's been around a year since I started the sequel to Outcast; I think it usually takes me at least six months to ruminate on ideas before they start to coalesce in my head. Then, another few months of research on various plot points (this time around: Victorian mad houses and advanced technology), and then another few months to write the damn thing. I finished the first draft this weekend and designed the cover, and overall I'm pretty happy with both. The book needs to go through several drafts before being ready for the CreateSpace treatment, but it was extremely cathartic to reach the end of the story. I figure this one will be ready by September (hopefully). In the meantime, I get to start the painful process of getting Outcast edited so I can actually consider submitting it to agents. Oy.

Naturally, I'm already starting to think about Book 3 . . . .

BTW: the image above is copywrited by me, so please don't reproduce it or steal it or anything uncool like that. Thanks;)

In the Cave . . .

I've been pretty entrenched lately with the book, and fairly unavailable for anything else. I always reach this point in writing something, where the story takes off full of action, and starts to write itself. I end up feeling as though I'm hurrying to transcribe it, like a historian sitting on a battlefield and scribbling away as the bullets fly. Sorry if I've been a little absent from the blog; I promise to return to much more interesting posts soon;)

Hitting the Trail . . .

via We Heart It

I'm going back to Outcast.

For those of you who are relatively new to the blog, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. If you check out the left-hand side of this blog, you'll find a little square called "On My Shelves", with two images in it. Those are two of the books I've written, and two of the three I've published. I'm not going to get all whine-y and ask you to buy them; they're not for everyone. If you like sci-fi, historical fiction, steampunk, or similar genres, you might like them. If you don't, that's cool. I like them, but I'm pretty biased.

"Outcast" is my most recent effort, currently in beta-phase. This was, by far, one of the most enjoyable writing experiences I've had so far: the characters were particularly vivid for me, and the story seemed to write itself. I often outline my books extensively ahead of time, but every once in a while I just get a single concept and jump headlong into it, and that's what happened with "Outcast". It went places I didn't expect and took on a life of its own, and by the end I didn't want to leave. Which is why, of course, I'm going back;)

Sequels are tricky beasts; they can be little more than vanity projects if you're not careful, just a way for an author to say, "Look! You remember them! Here they are again!" If you don't have something new to say with your characters, there's little point in picking them up again and trying to get people interested in them. It's taken a few months for me to really figure out a good enough reason to go back to my little Nevada town, but I think it's starting to take shape. I look forward to throwing Benjamin, Jack, Jonah, Poubelle, Jeremiah, Doc, and all the rest of them into a new adventure. This one is all about family: the one we're born into and the one we create, about fathers and children. For those of you who've read the first, I hope you're looking forward to the second. I know I am.

Cowboys and Aliens . . .

I'm not gonna lie: this might be awesome. As someone who happens to like the idea of cowboys and aliens inhabiting the same story, I'm intrigued.