Update: Too Much Going On, Honestly

The Best SFF Novels since 1970 Would You Turn the Page?

Update: Too Much Going On, Honestly

OKAY, FIRST

Tuyo series sale went live on Saturday and will continue through Wednesday. This would be a good time to point friends toward this series!

SECOND

Please, please leave a review for HEDESA if you’ve already read it. Here it is at Amazon. Here it is at Goodreads. I VERY MUCH APPRECIATE THIS!

THIRD

Actual update:

You know, it’s remarkably difficult to do two different things at the exact same time, I find, and therefore Sekaran slowed down last week, as I prioritized proofreading and tweaking Eight Doors. Aargh, I’m sick of it. I think my patience with proofreading has declined over time. Or, possibly even more plausible, maybe I always feel like that at this point and just block the memory.

Regardless, they’re both coming along. Part of one chapter to go plus maybe an epilogue for Sekaran. About finished with the tweaking read-through of Eight Doors. If it were just typos, that would be one thing, but it’s a thousand tiny tweaks. I can’t help myself, even though I’m dying of the tedium of making these teensy tweaks and then correcting the file.

MEANWHILE

I’ve put four audiobooks in motion: Invictus I and II, Hedesa, and This Hour. Yes, Tasmakat is still underway, and yes, progress has been made, and no, I don’t want to discuss it. I actually brought this up in order to report a strange but interesting phenomenon:

When you do an audiobook through ACX, you’ve got various alternatives, including payment options and so forth. Also, you can open a book for auditions or contact a specific narrator, and you can combine that by opening a book for auditions plus emailing as many narrators as you want and asking them to audition. There are thousands of narrators with samples, and you can filter by “male” and “fantasy” and then scan through and listen to the samples and decide who sounds like maybe they’d be good and you can then email them and if they feel like it they can do the audition. So this is relatively straightforward.

I listed Invictus I and Hedesa on the same day.

Overnight, Invictus I got 32 auditions. Hedesa got zero.

I honestly, truly thought that saying “Ability to pronounce Russian a plus” and including “eschahastesha” and “vysovashirovasin” in the audition script would scare people off. Instead, there appears to be a huge pent-up desire to narrate science fiction?

Anyway, I asked half a dozen of the people who auditioned for Invictus to please consider auditioning for Hedesa — male narrators split right down the middle into “sounds like an adult” vs “I could believe this is a teenager,” so it literally took less than five seconds per audition to decide who might be good for Hedesa. Then I scanned through producers and emailed another half dozen or so, and as a result Hedesa accumulated a dozen or so auditions as well, though you see this is still about a third as many as Invictus got in the first day. Anyway, several of the auditions were great, so that is now underway as well.

I’ll be interested, when I do No Foreign Sky, in seeing how that works. Is all SF going to get a huge amount of interest? Meanwhile, I’m going to be getting whiplash from listening to chapters of Hedesa alternately with Invictus.

MEANWHILE

Continuing drama on the dog health front, unfortunately. Poor little Haydee has an eye injury, a significant cut that seems to have probably picked up a serious infection in a hurry. She was squinting on Wednesday, she was at the vet on Thursday, she is getting eye drops every six hours plus oral antibiotics plus painkillers. She’ll be at the vet again this afternoon, and if the eye doesn’t look like it’s moving along in the right direction, the next step will be (sigh) an emergency visit to the ophthalmologist in St L, ideally right away. So I’m crossing my fingers, for both our sakes.