Followers may have noticed I haven’t been all that productive for a while. Aside from my contribution to Appalling Stories 4, I haven’t had anything published for years. Seems like all the bloggers at Virtual Pulp have stopped blogging, too. There are several reviews we’ve been meaning to write and post for months, and just haven’t been able to find the time.

I can only speak for myself. I’ve been going through a process of change in my professional life that has contributed to my decreased production. I’ve got a job that I really like now, probably my best civilian job ever, but I’m still running like crazy to keep up with it and might still be for a while. I’ve got creative irons in the fire, but can’t make predictions about when they’ll be done. And one of those projects, sucking up a good portion of my life outside work, is an audio version of False Flag.

The audio versions of Tomato Can Comeback, Hell & Gone and Tier Zero were all produced via royalty share using Amazon Audible’s ACX partner. For a few reasons, I plan to go a different route with the third book in the series. A fellow writer suggested I record it myself. I don’t have a great voice, but that voice comes at exactly the right price: free. So I hired myself.

The recording phase of the project was bad enough. I guess most people hate the sound of their own voice played back on a recording. I was no exception, but have come to be able to live with the embarrassment. What is worse, though, is the editing.

I like watching rants by Razorfist on topics that interest me. He’s pretty funny, but what impresses me the most is his ability to rapid-fire monologues for minutes on end without getting tongue-tied. I trip over my words constantly, mispronouncing things I know damn well how to pronounce; adding extra syllables for some unknown reason; and stopping because I thought I read something wrong but actually hadn’t. So there’s a lot of editing just to get rid of that. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

While recording, one of my dogs will invariably walk into my “studio,” loudly flop on the floor, start licking himself, and/or bang his tail or leg against the desk. Cut! Quiet on the set! Take Two… The microphone I’m using now usually doesn’t pick up the loud traffic going by on the road, but a dog’s ears sure do, and Rover wants the world to know about it. Cut! Take Three… Sometimes my voice just stops while my mouth keeps moving. Maybe that’s from not enough water. Take Four… I’m hydrated now. I could go for 72 hours without any gastro-intestinal anomalies whatsoever, but try to record something, and I have to belch every few sentences. Take Five… Some days my sinuses act up and I’m really nasal. It’s okay! Keep rolling! Just keep rolling… I do my best at setting up the mike and the shield, but still wind up popping my “P”s most of the time. Being especially talented, I can also pop “B”s and some other letters that just make no sense. Take Six… Speaking of pops, my lips and tongue are prolific at producing pops, clicks, clucks, and all kinds of annoying sounds, sometimes in the middle of a word.

You get the idea. All of that makes editing a chapter take about 3X longer than recording it did. And it’s tedious work. I’m oblivious to some mistakes until I’m in the middle of editing, so I didn’t repeat the line during a recording session. I’ll have to go back and re-record when the wife and kids are gone again, to reduce the ambient noise levels in the house.

So currently, I am less than halfway to having False Flag ready for publishing.

Why am I bothering to make an audiobook? Well, the publishing gurus out there will tell you it’s a promising new market for indy authors. I guess I’ll see. But I got into this corner of the publishing biz because I personally found audiobooks to be a godsend. I haven’t had time to sit down and read recreationally for a long time, but my previous jobs usually involved a lot of travelling. Audiobooks made it possible to read by proxy.

I bought and listened to quite a few Audible books. But for a couple different reasons, I cancelled my subscription. Kobo’s got a cool app that will let you read ebooks AND listen to audiobooks on your phone…but it looks like their selection is even more pozzed than Audible’s.

Which brings me to Castalia House. They’ve built their own platform, and have audio books for sale. While I don’t agree with all their authors or their founder on several issues, I was stoked about the idea of using my “voting dollars” on products from a company that is not full-commie WOKE.

So I bought The Law Dog Files to listen to on an eight hour trip. Got through about half of it and my wife called me. After hanging up, the player went back to the very beginning of the audio file (the whole book is one huge honkin’ track). I could not fast forward. No matter what I did, it started me at the very beginning so I’d have to listen to the same several hours all over again before moving on. Same thing if I try to rewind (move the slider on the progress bar) and listen to a word or phrase again (I have pretty bad hearing loss and parts of human speech fall right into the frequencies I have trouble picking up). Nope, can’t do that. No matter where I put the slider on the progress bar, it ignores my input and resets all the way back to the beginning so I’ll listen to the same six hours of recording first.

I tried a couple different audio players and had the same exact problem.

Now, it seems logical that these players have sliders on their progress bars for the very reason that a listener will want to navigate to different parts of the recording. It does not seem logical that every single one of them has a progress bar/slider that doesn’t work and that 1. I’m the only listener to ever have noticed, or 2. these tools don’t work for anybody, but listeners continue using these apps anyway.  Therefore, it is entirely possible that there is something wrong with the file I bought.

I never had this problem with Audible Books. And if I had, at least their books are broken up into chapter-length files, so at worst I would have to listen to a whole chapter again. But I never had any trouble going back to the part I didn’t catch.

I guess I could sideload the file onto my computer and listen to it with a desktop version of Windows Media Player…but that defeats the purpose. I got the book to listen to while traveling. If I had the time to sit around the house or my job listening to a multi-hour recording, I’d just read the print or e-book version.

Since I ran into the same problem with different players on my phone, I contacted Castalia House and explained the issue, asking for advice. Maybe they knew of a player that wouldn’t force me all the way back to the beginning. Maybe they knew of a setting in a player I could tweak. Maybe the file they sold me was jacked up somehow.

Never got a reply.

Time passed. Still no reply, so I contacted them and explained the situation again.

No reply.

Was their “Contact Us” form malfunctioning? (I’ve had problems with some versions of those forms on this blog before.) But the trip was over, life went on, and I forgot about it.

The other day I was reading the comment section of a post on Castalia’s owner’s blog. While writing a comment, something jogged my memory about Law Dog.

Here’s what I tacked onto the end of my comment:

“…I bought the audio version of the Law Dog Files and have been having trouble with it. There might be an easy solution, but I’ve sent a couple requests for help or advice through Castalia’s help/contact us form, and never got a reply back.”

Here is the response to what I said:

“We don’t provide tech support for how to use basic file formats. We don’t have the time or the manpower to educate everyone on these things.

I’m not trying to sound sarcastic here, but would you contact Sony to ask them how to use the mp3 file that you bought from them?”

Translation:

“We don’t want or need your business. Don’t ever buy audiobooks from us again.”

Check. Anyway, below are the links to the Audible books I have out. The  exclusivity contract with Audible should be ending in a year or two. I don’t remember everything from the agreement and their policy changes since then. I’ll have to look up the info again and see if the existing recordings can then be released to the broad market, or if I’ll have to re-record those. Either way, False Flag should be available by then.