swan_tower | Entries tagged with audio

Book View Cafe has started up a YouTube channel for author readings -- it's a great way to sample the works in our catalogue, if you enjoy listening to fiction as well as reading it on the page. I've done recordings of samples for many of my titles there, and those are starting to roll out; if you want to hear me reading the prologue from Midnight Never Come or from In Ashes Lie, go check 'em out!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/UZopbX)

I've managed to accumulate a small pile of audio news for y'all!

The big one is that at long last, the Onyx Court series is getting an audio treatment, courtesy of Blackstone Audio. Midnight Never Come came out last week; you can pick up that one from Apple or from Audible. The rest of the series will follow in due course!

I've also been doing a pile of audio stuff with Serial Box, starting last year. So far they've put up ten of my short stories and novelettes: "Daughter of Necessity," "Coyotaje," "Love, Cayce," "Once a Goddess," "The Genius Prize," "At the Sign of the Crow and Quill," "Mad Maudlin," "A Mask of Flesh," "What Still Abides," and "Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood." But the big news here is that they're going to do some of my novellas, as well! Deeds of Men was already done as an audiobook some years ago, and I don't hold the rights for The Eternal Knot, but they'll be recording audio versions of Dancing the Warrior and the two Varekai novellas, Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood. I'll announce those here once they're done!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/961vsG)

I am resurfacing to let you know that “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review” finally has an audio version! Brought to you by the lovely folks at Cast of Wonders, including the inestimable Alasdair Stuart, who does a splendid turn as Mr. Benjamin Talbot, F.P.C.

In the meanwhile . . . yeah, it’s been dead around here, hasn’t it? In early February I went to Seattle to teach a one-day workshop at Clarion West on writing fight scenes, and while I was there I seem to have picked up a cold that knocked me flat for a solid week. When I picked myself up from that, I found out a hacker had apparently compromised my laptop, necessitating a complete re-OS for security. I’m still in the process of getting everything set up again after that. And then — because February was a month, let me tell you — somebody attempted to steal the catalytic converter out of our Prius while my husband and I were at the dojo. They didn’t succeed, possibly because they got scared off . . . but they sawed through a hose and partway through the exhaust pipe. So now we’re waiting to hear from insurance whether the repair bill would be high enough to warrant just totaling the car.

Yeah.

Now, I should make it clear that this is not an apocalyptic problem for us. We’re annoyed, because the Prius has been trundling along pretty well for going on thirteen years now; it’s long since paid off, and life without making regular car payments has been nice. We can afford to make new car payments, though, and I think my husband’s irritation is tempered by the possibility that we might go from having a hybrid to a fully electric car (something he’s been keeping his eye on for a while, though we weren’t intending to buy any time soon). Still — it isn’t fun.

And my February was really not as full of productivity as it probably needed to be. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to go attempt to make March better on that count.

A whole bunch of audio links have piled up in my inbox lately, so here — have things to listen to!

I’ve raved before about how awesome a narrator I have for the Memoir audiobooks. But if you haven’t checked them out, and need to hear just how fabulous Kate Reading is, here’s an excerpt from In the Labyrinth of Drakes. It’s spoiler-free, so if you haven’t caught up with the story yet, don’t worry about hearing anything you shouldn’t.

If you’d like to hear me reading from Cold-Forged Flame, the Varekai novella coming out this September, here’s a recording from SF in SF. My reading starts around 36:30, after M. Thomas Gammarino, and then there’s a Q&A after.

While I was in San Diego for Mysterious Galaxy’s birthday bash, I recorded with the Geekitude podcast, which is posted here. My segment starts at the hour and twenty-two minute mark, and we discuss a host of things, ranging from what it’s like to wrap up the Memoirs, to hitting your thirties and not being made of rubber anymore, to RPGs and my experiences with them.

Here’s a brief video interview I did with ActuSF during Imaginales. The questions are entirely in French — my interpreter, Hélène Bury, was translating them for me, but too quietly for the camera to pick up — but I answer in English, before Hélène translates it for the camera.

I don’t have a fifth thing. Curse the internet for establishing that five things make a post! We’ll have to be satisfied with 80% of a post instead.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/772903.html

1) I sold a short story! “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review“ will be up at Tor.com some time next spring. As the title suggests, this is a Lady Trent story — the one I wrote while on tour this past May, in fact, and some of you may have heard me read it at BayCon.

2) I sold another short story! Continuing my unbroken streak, I will have a piece in the fifth Clockwork Phoenix anthology: “The Mirror-City,” which takes place in a Venice-like setting. Did I come up with it while in Venice? Nope; the idea is years old, and deadlines meant I actually had to write and submit the thing before I ever left for the real place. :-)

3) If you prefer to get your novels in audiobook form, you’re in luck: Warrior and Witch are both now available on Audible. With shiny new covers, no less!

And with that, I’m off to World Fantasy tomorrow. See some of you there!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/749255.html

Good timing: I read “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes” at BayCon last weekend, and it turns out Pseudopod put up their recording of it at the same time! So if you weren’t there to hear me read it, now you can go hear Amanda Fitzwater do so instead.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/737842.html

For the Driftwood fans out there (I know there are more than a few of you), Wilson Fowlie has read “The Ascent of Unreason” for Podcastle. If you missed it when BCS podcasted it, or when they published the text version, head on over and give it a listen!

Also, in the “good causes” category of links: Pat Rothfuss, the brain behind the Worldbuilders fundraising charity for Heifer International, has decided he isn’t pouring enough time and effort into benefiting the world, so he’s expanded his enterprise into selling signed first editions from authors who wish to donate a few. I think I sent in ten copies of The Tropic of Serpents; no idea how many are left, but (as of me posting this) there’s at least one. The money goes to charity, so if you want a book and the warm glow of knowing you’ve done something good, this is a splendid chance to get both at once.

(I don’t have five things to make a post, but I do have this: another shout-out for A Natural History of Dragons over on io9, this time in the context of “10 Great Novels That Will Make You More Passionate About Science.” It’s a list that makes for some pretty interesting reading, I must say.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/678947.html

The Kirkus review is online now. I expect some portion of this is going to end up on a book cover eventually:

This, the second of Isabella’s retrospective memoirs, is as uncompromisingly honest and forthright as the first, narrated in Brennan’s usual crisp, vivid style, with a heroine at once admirable, formidable and captivating. Reader, lose no time in making Isabella’s acquaintance.

(Though my actual favorite part of it is the bit where they say “And during her adventures in the Green Hell—the book’s finest section—Isabella will find sociology as important as natural history…” Because yes: the anthropological side of things is indeed just as important as the biological side. Dragons cannot be separated from the way human beings view and interact with them.)

Two shiny bits of news regarding A Natural History of Dragons, to go along with the run-up to Serpents: it’s made both Booklist‘s Notable Books Reading List, and the American Library Association’s 2014 Reading List (via their Reference and User Services Association arm). I’m in company with V.E. Schwab’s Vicious in both those places, which makes me think I really ought to check that one out.

Also, this slipped out during the holiday season, and I only just noticed it now: the audiobook of Deeds of Men is on sale. (I’ve gone from no audiobooks to three of ‘em in the space of a few months. Heh.)

I think that’s it for now . . . .

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/620481.html

“Mad Maudlin” is live on Tor.com! And the artwork for it is as beautiful as it was the first time I saw it.

You know what else is live? This audio excerpt from The Tropic of Serpents. There is also a sweepstakes, if you want to win a copy of the book.

Also live: a Con or Bust auction with a pair of ARCs up for grabs. It’s your chance to get signed copies of both A Natural History of Dragons and The Tropic of Serpents, while benefiting a good cause!

Not live yet: the Kirkus review. I think that goes up tomorrow.

Live and ongoing: Letters from Lady Trent. Write! Receive! Don’t make me walk aaaaaaaaall the way to the post office for nothing! (It’s a whole ten minutes away. I could die of exhaustion, y’all. But finding letters gives me the strength to soldier on.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/619713.html

Seven and a half years with my books being only ink on the page or pixels on the screen, and now I have two audiobooks landing atop one another. :-D

Remember me mentioning that giant deal Book View Cafe signed with Audible? Well, now you can listen to Lies and Prophecy, too! Different narrator than A Natural History of Dragons (and by the way, I've listened to the sample for that one now, and it's fabulous), and it's likely that my other project will get yet a different reader -- especially since the pov in that one is male.

Did I mention that I have a third project with them? No? Well, you'll just have to wait and see what that one is. :-)

I do, by the way, still have plans for a print edition of Lies and Prophecy. I'm dependent on the assistance of others for that, though, so it will have to wait for a moment when somebody can spare the time and energy to help. In the meanwhile, the ebook isn't going away. :-)

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/606343.html

A Natural History of Dragons is now an audiobook.

Actually, it's been an audiobook since Friday, but I was busy running around doing other things and didn't manage to post about it right away. And then it was the weekend, so I waited. Mondays need fun things to liven them up, don't you think?

I haven't yet heard the thing myself, but I did correspond with the narrator beforehand, and based on that I expect she did an excellent job. She asked all the kinds of questions you're supposed to hope your narrator asks, like how to pronounce things and whether you have any models in mind for what the voices should be like and so on. (In fact, her pronunciation of the names is probably better than mine, since my instructions included a lot of things like "this is how I say it, but it's supposed to sound like French and I'm terrible at that so ignore me if I've got it wrong.")

So if you've been waiting for the chance to listen to the book -- those of you with driving commutes or gym workouts or such -- now you can!

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/606151.html

I thought I had linked to this here before, but if so, I can't find it.

During World Fantasy, Karen Burnham of Locus sat me and Kari Sperring (

la_marquise_de_) down in front of a microphone to talk about a topic of our choosing. We chose Kari's "history is not a theme park" rant, and went from there, to, uh, everywhere. Subjects touched on included: The Three Musketeers, Aztecs and cultural relativism, Biblical archaeology, hemming clothing, stew, Mongolian steppe ponies, Minoan murals, authenticity in history, hippie elves, late medieval English blacksmithing guild laws, the Great London Plague of 1665, trousers and pigs, Biblical archaeology, kicking postmodernism in the head, seventeenth-century Parisian mud, telepathic wombats, and "the answer to almost everything is turnips."

All these things and more await you on the Locus website. You can listen to the file there or download it for later hearing. We ramble on for about an hour and twelve minutes; Karen said afterward that normally she waits for a lull in the conversation, then steps in to say "well, that about wraps things up." With us, she had to go in with a crowbar, or we would have kept rolling for another hour. We enjoyed it a lot -- well, certainly I did -- and I hope you do, too.

In contrast to the happy stories I posted before, here's something dark and grim for the end of the year: Flash on the Borderlands V, a collection of three flash pieces over at Pseudopod, one of which is my fairy-tale retelling "The Snow-White Heart." Note that is Pseudopod and not Podcastle; this is the horror sibling of the EA podcast family, and as I have not yet listened to the whole file, I can't tell you what lurks in the other two stories. (Mine starts with cannibalism and goes downhill from there.) Listen at your own risk.

There will be an audio version of "Two Pretenders" in BCS; that will reportedly go live in January, which is also (I believe) when the print version itself will be published.

Back to drooling on myself, by which I mean prepping for game tonight.

If you're the sort of person who likes audio fiction, "Kingspeaker" has gone up at Podcastle. (There's a download link at the bottom of that entry, or you can subscribe to the whole podcast via iTunes, etc.)

More collated linky, and then maybe next week I'll get around to posting about Ada Lovelace and her wings.

Another guest-blog: me at Tiffany Trent's LJ, talking about researching in order to get things wrong.

More "And Blow Them at the Moon": the giveaway is ended (Scott will be picking a winner soon), but if you'd like to listen to the story, the podcast version is now available. I enjoyed this recording immensely -- like, meant to just check it out, but ended up listening to the whole thing -- because Scott arranged for a British reader, who does a marvelous job with the accents. He even does a Cornish accent for the knockers! Or something I presume is a Cornish accent, anyway! (I have no idea what they sound like. Which is Reason #17 why he's a better reader for the story than I am.)

Further reviews of A Star Shall Fall: Mark Yon at SFF World, which he sums up as "An ambitious tale and a pleasing triumph. Wonderful." His comments make me very happy. Watch out for borderline spoilers near the end of the review, though. Locus also had a very good review, though it isn't online, but this bit is pretty quotable:

There’s a sly brilliance to Brennan’s ongoing tales where the city of London moves through history . . . A Star Shall Fall has room enough for intellect and emotion, great issues as well as an array of individuals and personalities: self-mocking wit, bluntness, and ardor among others. As fear of the Dragon mounts, humans and fae come together in powerful scenes that both reflect and find ways to transcend the gap between beings with such very different experiences of Life and Time.

Finally, another public appearance for me: I'll be down in SoCal on October 23rd for the SCIBA Author Feast and Trade Show (yes, it's really called that). SCIBA is an independent booksellers' association, so this is an industry event rather than a fan one, but if any of you will be there, be sure to say hi!

Er, that's only four things. Uh. Here, have cats in an IKEA store.

One of the odd perks of my sleep schedule (going to bed circa 2 or 3 a.m. West Coast time, waking up circa 10 or 11 a.m.) is that most U.S.-based people have started their business day before I get up. And that means a disproportionate number of the e-mails I get saying "I'd like to buy your story!" are in my inbox by the time I shuffle into my office, starting my day with a smile.

Which is by way of saying that Pseudopod will be doing an audio reprint of "The Snow-White Heart," which originally came out in the final issue of Talebones.

I've done another reading for Podcastle: "Väinämöinen and the Singing Fish," by Marissa Lingen (

mrissa). My apologies to both Marissa and my erstwhile Finnish teacher for any mispronunciations I may have committed in the course of recording that story.

(This is what I get for telling the Podcastle editors what foreign languages I'd studied. Though in checking that e-mail, I see I didn't even mention the Finnish, because I only studied it for only two weeks. I hope they never find out about my two weeks of Navajo . . . .)

Also, it turns out that both "Once a Goddess" and "Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual" got Honorable Mentions from Gardner Dozois in the most recent Year's Best Science Fiction. Given that I only had seven stories out last year, I'm pretty pleased with that average.

First, Clockwork Phoenix 3 debuts today. This contains "The Gospel of Nachash," which is my Bible + Sekrit Ingredient story. The whole anthology series has been pretty awesome, full of (as the subtitle has it) "beauty and strangeness;" I highly recommend all three volumes. (And not just 'cause I'm in them.)

Second, there will be audio of "And Blow Them at the Moon," the Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story. Which hasn't been published yet, but I still wanted to mention the audio version is coming, if you prefer to consume your short fiction aurally.

That header sounds painful, now that I think about it.

Anyway, if you would prefer to listen to a story about Driftwood rather than read it, you can now download the audio from BCS. (Which also has a new Aliette de Bodard story this week, one of her Aztec pieces. I haven't read it yet, but I am very much looking forward to it.)

I've also put up an extra tidbit for the Driftwood fans: "Smiling at the End of the World." It's a piece of flash fiction from Last's point of view, but since Driftwood flash doesn't stand on its own very well, I've chosen to just post it to my site as a freebie. Enjoy!

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Swan Tower

Entries tagged with audio

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Readings on YouTube!

all the audio that's fit to hear

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Fun things to listen to

Three announcements

The Werewolf Fake Academic Paper, now in your ear!

Hear ye, hear ye! (Also see, maybe buy)

The news, it comes fast and thick

Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes / For to save her shoes from gravel

Hear ye, hear ye! . . . Again!

Hear ye, hear ye . . . .

Locus Podcast on, um, everything?

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a brief note

more Podcastle fun

rounding up the week

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two bits of short story news

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