sandra m. odell

Do you recall being read to as a child? The highs and lows of a familiar voice lulling you to sleep or keeping you entertained, if only for a few minutes? Where did it happen? In bed? Curled up together on the couch or in a favorite chair? On the subway? Outside under a tree? What did the voices read? Works by Laura Ingalls Wilder? Doctor Seuss? Langston Hughes? Judy Blume? Staples such as Goodnight Moon, Pat the Bunny, The Hobbit, There’s A Monster At The End Of This Book, any of the Harry Potter books?

Readng to as a child stimulates a number of areas of growth: language development; social bonding; letter and color recognition. Not that the child cares about any of that. Reading fantasy to a child opens up worlds of possibility. When done right, all the child cares about is the next line in the story, the next fantastic moment and location that will sweep them away to somewhere wondrous where they don’t have to do chores, finish homework, or hurt, if only for a little while.

The same can be said for audio fantasy fiction as an adult. Load an audio book, click on your favorite podcast, and let someone tell you a story. I’m not talking radio dramas or stage performances, though those have their merits. I mean a story or novel, something with the “he said”, “she did”, “they saw” intact, A full package deal with one narrator or many, sound effects and music or a bare bones production. There is something about listening to a story that allows our thoughts to soar. We focus on the wonder of the written word brought to life by the tradition of passing tales from one generation to another. Good stories make us feel. Great stories make us think.

All of the above is a fancy way of saying “I like audio fiction.”

The development of easily accessibly audio fiction has opened doors to a whole new audience of readers. Whether on a bus, at home alone, in the gym, driving to work, or “too busy to read”, audio fiction is the perfect hands-free medium to indulge yourself in a bit of fancy while continuing about your day. I often listen to stories while doing household chores, and audio books frequently transform rush hour traffic into quality time. At night, I put myself to bed with my favorite fantasy or horror fiction podcast. I have friends who listen to books while jogging or working out, and one who keeps a CD collection of Bradbury’s works in the bathroom so she can “read in the tub.”

SF/F/H/YA fiction have benefited from a variety of audio markets that allow readers to sample new authors, revisit old favorites, and delve into new areas of interest. Larger chain bookstores rarely deviate from the regular offerings of the major publishing houses. Audio fiction allows you to mix it up a bit, seek out different voices, under represented voices, women writers, LGBTQ writers, writers of color, writers with disabilities.

Services such as iTunes, Audible.com, and Blackstone Audio offer short story collections and a range of full length novels. A growing number of genre fiction podcasts present a selection of short fiction from both new authors and seasoned, award-winning writers of note. Certain podcasts also produce classic genre stories that might otherwise be overlooked by modern readers in the hurry and crush to buy the next mass-market best seller. Not that there’s anything wrong with best sellers. I listen to those as well.

Audio fiction is often free in the case of podcasts, is relatively cost competitive when compared to physical books or eBooks, and is often far more portable. Multicast productions present distinct character voices, while certain narrators are skilled enough to breathe life into the story with the barest of inflections. Most podcasts are produced under a creative commons license that encourages you to share the work with friends or on any number of social media platforms so long as you don’t change the attribution or the production itself. You can loan someone an audio CD or file of a downloaded work, but please don’t give copies away. Like writers, narrators and sound crews work hard to produce the best product possible and deserve to be paid for their efforts.

So, it’s a big audio world out there. Where do you start? Check out the links to some of my favorite genre fiction podcasts below and see what tickles your ears’ fancy.

• Podcastle: http://podcastle.org/
• Pseudopod: http://pseudopod.org/
• Escape Pod: http://escapepod.org/
• The Drabblecast: http://www.drabblecast.org/
• Cast of Wonders: http://www.castofwonders.org/
• Clarkesworld Magazine: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com
• Toasted Cake: http://toastedcake.com/

#sfwapro

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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One of the things I stress to students is that you cannot wait for the muse. And, in fact, the more you wait for her, the less likely she is to arrive.

For example. The last few days I’ve been working at getting back into the flow of writing daily. I held myself accountable and post daily word counts here or on Twitter. And lemme tell you, some of those words were difficult to wrestle out of my skull and onto the page. One way I can tell things are going in difficult fits and spurts is that I’ll hop around a lot from story to story.

One of those projects is “Prairiedog Town” (which is definitely getting a different title). I started jotting down mental notes for it while traveling through Kansas, but only had a thousand words or so on it before last week. It was slow writing, partially because I wasn’t sure how I was getting from one point to another in the story. I knew it was a piece about a woman reclaiming her humanity and I had a good idea of what the penultimate scene would look like.

So I kept jotting words down in sporadic clumps of a few hundred at a time, yerking the story along in an awkward and impatient way. It helped when I incorporated a prompt from Sandra M. Odell, a woman finding an abandoned teddy bear by the road. But it still was slow slogging. Yesterday I took a break from it.

And then, this morning, while working on it, things began to fall into place. A secondary character had popped up, and I understood how to bring her back into the story — and why. A piece that was supposed to take three days suddenly shortened into a single night, and with that, the ultimate scene came clear. I went through, pulling the threads into place as close to a thousand words came spilling out and into the story.

It’s not done yet — maybe another thousand words to go, but I’ve got a map of it, and comments where I need to go back and insert things. Here, for example, is what a section of today’s work looks like:

They end up chatting. Talia asks after father. Relates that he’s died. Talia asks if she’s going to the funeral.

No
It’s what you’d say either way, isn’t it.
That’s true
I’ll be there. On the outskirts.

She freezes again. It’s an old code word they used to use, back in the days when they worked together. It’s someplace close but (some distance) to the (direction).

And most importantly at all, things have come together to a point where I’m excited about the story, feel that some clever stuff has been worked in or has had places made for it. It’ll end up being around 4-5 thousand words, and I know I’ll finish it by the end of this month, because it’s designated as the next story to go out in the Patreon campaign.

And if I hadn’t done that picking away at it — scraping those words out of my skull, even though it felt painful and awkward and uninspired — I would have never gotten to that point at all.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

Lisa Mantchev described it best when she Tweeted: I’ve never actually been run over by a Zamboni full of glitter, but that’s what it feels like after a really great convention.

That’s how SteamCon was. I arrived Friday afternoon for the Steampunk Reimagines Fairy Tales. This was a writing-focused panel, and I’d like to see future SteamCons make a wider space for a writing track, since this was jam-packed with attendees. Lisa Mantchev was our excellent moderator, and J.R. Boyett, a fellow participant in the FairyPunk project, was another panelist. We talked about how to create stories that best take advantage of the steampunk setting, without making it seem as though you’re just gluing a gear on it.

Later that evening, I had the first of my three panels on Victorian explorers. This was the best of them, because it focused on women explorers, and that’s an area I am reasonably well-read in, because I love some of those stories so much. That session included moderator Carmen Beaudry, Lori Edwards and another exquisitely garbed woman whose name, unfortunately, I didn’t catch. It was AWESOME and we all had a lovely time. I’ll mention some of the names we touched on, and urge you to go look these ladies and their amazing stories up: Harriet Chalmers Adams, Gertrude Bell, Isabelle Eberhardt, Mary Kingsley, Annie Smith Peck, May French Sheldon, and Lady Hester Stanhope, among many others.

Saturday was two more panels on expeditions, first one with Joshua Merrill-Nach on Great Quests of the 19th Century and later one on cryptozooological expeditions with a last minute substitute panelist whose name I know only as “Sean,” unfortunately, but who was terrific. Both panels were pretty full, the second one standing room only.

Sunday morning, I read from “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart” to a small but select audience that included the fabulous Sandra M. Odell. And then I made one last pass through the wonders of the dealer’s room and retreated home. Adieu glitter and goggles!