Urchins, while Swimming by Cat Valente live in Podcastle

A wonderful story by Cathrynne M. Valente was given to me to narrate for Podcastle . It's a wonderful modern version of the Rusalka story about a river nymph who entices men into the water.

There are lots of Russian names in the story and a lullaby to sing 3 times, by3 different female characters. I loved this story. It rolled right of the tongue despite the Russian (which I don't speak and don't know the rules of pronunciation for) and is beautifully written. It packs a bit of an emotional punch too. I hope you enjoy it!

Here's the link: Urchins, While Swimming
Or download it at iTunes.

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List of Podcast appearances

OK, I've been at this awhile but it's only just occurring to me that I should start an (as yet incomplete) running list of my podcast appearances complete with links, etc. Here it is with the most recent first:

• -- Poetry Planet No. 7: "2012 Rhysling Award Showcase", StarShipSofa No. 256
• -- Main Fiction: The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942 by Kim Stanley Robinson, StarShipSofa No. 249
• -- Poetry Planet No. 6: "Moon Imaginings" StarShipSofa No. 245
• -- Poetry Planet No. 5b: "Time Travel - Part 2" StarShipSofa No. 229
• -- Short Fiction: "Urchins, While Swimming", by Cathryn M. Valente PodCastle No. 198
• -- Short Fiction: "Unwoven", Tim Waggoner, Tales to Terrify No. 5
• -- Poetry Planet No. 5a: "Time Travel - Part 1" StarShipSofa No. 223
• -- Poetry Planet No. 4: "Coming Home" StarShipSofa No. 208
• -- Poetry Planet No. 3: "Rhysling Award Showcase", StarShipSofa No. 202
• -- Poetry Planet No. 2: "First Contact", StarShipSofa No. 192
• -- Poetry Planet No. 1: "Introduction", StarShipSofa No. 184
• -- Fiction: Kingspeaker by Marie Brennan, Podcastle No. 122
• -- Music: Theme Music for Blood and Chrome Podcast
• -- Transcriber Editorial: StarShipSofa No. 130
• -- Fiction: Love Among the Talus by Elizabeth Bear, Podcastle No. 96
• -- Poetry: Clone Assassin by Lyn C. A Gardner, StarShipSofa No. 102
• -- Fiction: Daughter of Botu by Eugie Foster, Podcastle No. 63
• -- Flash Fiction: A Hand and Honor by Brenda Cooper, StarShipSofa No. 91
• -- Main Fiction: Gunfight at the Sugarloaf Cafe and Taxidermy by Jeff Carlson, StarShipSofa No. 88
• -- Main Fiction: Vinegar Peace, Or the Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage by Michael Bishop, StarShipSofa No. 82
• -- Nebula Nominee: - 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss By Kij Johnson, StarShipSofa No. 72
• -- Poetry: Three Poems - Marble People, Chess People and Gargoyle People by Bruce Boston, StarShipsofa No. 71
• -- Sofanauts: No. 5 May 16, 2009
• -- Poetry: If Cold Is A War by Ann K Schwader, StarShipSofa No. 70
• -- Poetry: Time Trapped by Ann K Schwader, StarShipSofa No. 69
• -- Fiction: Room Service by Donna George Storey, Nobilis Erotica No. 113
• -- Poetry: Our Fallen Do Not Fall by Ann K Schwader, StarShipSofa No. 61
• -- Poetry: On Any Given Midnight by Ann K Schwader, StarShipSofa No. 60
• -- Poetry: Fifty Cents by Mark Rich, StarShipSofa No. 57
• -- Music: Silent Night, Diane à 3, StarShipSofa No. 56
• -- Fiction: Ancestor Money by Maureen McHugh, Podcastle No. 36
• -- Main Fiction: A View From A Height by Joan D. Vinge, StarShipSofa No. 54
• -- Poetry: An Eccentric In Orbit by Laurel Winter, StarShipSofa No. 53
• -- Poetry: King’s Men by Samantha Henderson, StarShipSofa No. 47
• -- Poetry: Fairytale Graveyard by Mikal Trimm, StarShipSofa No. 42
• -- Poetry: Judy Resnick by Laurel Winter, StarShipSofa No. 40
• -- Main Fiction: Tideline by Elizabeth Bea, StarShipSofa No. 39 
• -- Flash Fiction: Moon Over Baton Rouge by Atalanta Pendragonne, StarShipSofa No. 36
• -- Poetry: Goodbye Is Meaningless by Mark Rich, StarShipSofa No. 33 
• -- Poetry: Goodbye Is Meaningless by Laurel Winter StarShipSofa No. 32
• -- Poetry: How To Make Love To A Shark by Laurel Winter StarShipSofa No. 30 
• -- Poetry: Time Travel Verb Tenses by Laurel Winter StarShipSofa No. 29 
• -- Poetry: They Arrived by Mark Rich, StarShipSofa No. 27
• -- Poetry: Godlet by Laurel Winter StarShipSofa No. 26
• -- Main Fiction: Sledge Makers Daughter by Alastair Reynolds StarShipSofa No. 17
• -- Main Fiction: Lightling Out by Ken MacLeod StarShipSofa No. 16
• -- Main Fiction: Infinity Syrup by Laurel Winter StarShipSofa No. 10
• 
  

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Hugos, PodCastle

OK, I'm very slow from the starting line, but my favorite Podcast, the one I narrate for occassionally, StarShipSofa with Tony C. Smith has just become the first ever Podcast to win a Hugo Award! This happened in Melbourne, Australia where the WorldCon was held this year. The award is for Best FanZine. Which means it is an amateur magazine (of sorts) contributed to by fans of Science Fiction. This couldn't describe the StarShipSofa better! Tony is the master mind who gets authors to donate their fiction and herds probably a hundred volunteers to do narrations and articles (on the genre history, science news, online fiction, comics, movies, book reviews, you name it). It's heroic, really. He truly deserves this award. But so do all of us that contribute to it. We are a truly wonderful community that enjoys each other as much as Science Fiction!

Also, my most recent narration to go live is "Kingspeaker" by Marie Brennan. It's over on PodCastle and you can listen to it here: "Kingspeaker" It's a very nice little story, which I think was perfect for me to narrate. It's nothing earth-shattering, but lovely. Definitely not a waste of a half hour, if you have it.

I'd like to extend a warm welcome to my most recent follower, Robyn Bradshaw. She and her husband are members of the aforementioned StarShipSofa family. She did some transcribing for the book, The Captain's Logs (did I mention that here?1?) and her husband is a fabulous musician, (you should google him if you don't know who he is) who's written a couple of songs for the Sofa. The two of them have some narration up their sleeves, too, I'm told. Thanks for subscribing, Robyn!

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Whew! Completed story narration

Yes, in a whirlwind of activity I managed to get the narration of a story, "Kingspeaker" by Marie Brennan completed for PodCastle by the deadline! w00t! I will let you all know when it goes up there. Probably within the next few weeks.

Now I still have a story and 3 million poems to do for StarShipSofa. Magnus is gone all next week, so I should manage to get at least the story done! I've gotten a start on it already, as I mentioned in an earlier post, but then this rush-job PodCastle story came along. Sorry Tony!

And make room for a new follower, people! Well, Larry, I don't know how long you've been following my blog (openly!), but I just saw your mug as my most recent follower, so I'm welcoming you now! Isn't there some sort of notification available?

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HELLO! Hello? hello? ello? lo?

Is there an echo in here?!? There surely must be since I haven't written a post since New Years, it seems! Wow. Well, maybe this will be the first of many new posts. We'll see...

An update:

My son Dante continues to occupy most of my time. He's adorable and fascinating and funny. And I'm smitten.

I'm continuing to teach, and in January I started teaching again, full-time, so to speak, meaning that I managed to get all of my pupils and a couple of new ones to commit to coming on one of 2 days per week. I'm now teaching Monday and Friday afternoons and usually into the evening. I have a babysitter who watches Dante in the Living Room while I teaching down at the other end of the apartment. It works pretty well. I'm considering changing Fridays to Thursdays, so that we can have a long weekend and I won't necessarily have to reschedule all the lessons.

I recorded another story for PodCastle in March and neglected to blog about it - "Love Among the Talus" by Elizabeth Bear. A nice little story that you can listen to here

They've asked my to record another story for them and Tony from StarShipSofa has also asked for a recording, this one by Gwyneth Jones! I'll be sure to blog more about them when I've finished and when they air.

I had an audition rehearsal with a local cabaret a cappella group here in Hannover called Ferrari Küßchen, which went pretty well. It would be a big commitment, but a great opportunity and something different for me. It would definitely get me out there singing, which is what matters to me at this point. :-) It's not a done deal yet though. We are going to have more meetings/rehearsals, and Magnus, Dante and I are going to spend a performance day with the group to see what it involves. I probably wouldn't start performing with them before January anyway. I'll keep you posted!

So, I'd say that's enough for now! If you are still around drop me a comment, and let me know! Thanks!

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Narration on PodCastle! Daughter of Botu, by Eugie Foster

We are interrupting our regularly scheduled broadcast....

Just wanted to let you know before it gets old, that one of my major narration projects has just gone live over at the main fantasy podcast magazine - Podcastle.

It's called Daughter of Botu, by Eugie Foster. Eugie Foster is an wonderful writer living in Atlanta and you may have heard any number of her stories in online podcast magazines such as EscapePod, ClonePod, PseudoPod and Drabblecast. You can read more about her and her over 100 publications at her website.

Daughter of Botu, an eastern story of whimsy, can be found in Eugie's short story collection, "Returning My Sister's Face: And other Eastern Stories of Whimsy and Malice" (follow the link to Amazon.com). It also received honorable mention in "The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection", edited by Gardner Dozois. It's the story of a young "rabbit", a Daughter of Botu, who meets, falls in love with and marries a local prince. At court, in human form, her life changes drastically, and not necessarily for the good.

I really enjoyed narrating this story. It has a fairy tale quality with delightful, distinct characters.

Enjoy!

Bleh

I'm having a Charlie Brown kind of day. Maybe it's been exacerbated by the repeated listenings to A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, but I got two bits of not-happy news in the last two days. It's not exactly bad news but, you know, just not good. Am I taking it too personally? I'll let you be the judge:

1) I blogged last week about the story I narrated coming out on PodCastle. Yesterday I went to Escape Artist's (they produce the podcast) forums online and read the responses to the story. People there say what they want and are not inhibited because I'm not a presence there, like they might be at StarShipSofa. They didn't like my narration. At all. They also didn't much like the story, but that's beside the point. They thought I sounded bored, or simply not emotionally involved. Maybe I wasn't, although I did like the story. One poster thought my accents were inconsistent, and there I'd have to concede the point. I'm not great with accents. I shouldn't try to do them, but in this narration I did - a light southern accent and a pseudo-Asian one. Bad.

2) The other not-happy news is that I didn't make the short list for the First Annual Sofanaught Awards. I can be a bit blasé about this one, because the folks that did make the short list deserve to be on there. But I wanted to be. More than I think I let myself believe.

Now I'm thinking - "Do I suck as a narrator?" I really enjoy doing it and have no delusions that I'm a great one, I can recognize that I need to improve. But you know, it's hard to hear the criticism - expressed outright or not.

That is all.

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Your cup runneth over

Yes, yesterday two different narrations I've done came out on two different podcasts:

PodCastle #36: "Ancestor Money" by Maureen McHugh. This is an interesting look at what the afterlife might be like.

StarShipSofa #54: "View from a Height" by Joan D. Vinge. Also on that show is poetry by fellow Wisconsinite Mark Rich, Flash Fiction by my buddy Matthew Sanborn Smith, and a fantastic piece of genre history by our resident historian Amy H. Sturgis.

We are in the 2nd week of nominations for the Sofanaughts Awards at StarShipSofa. Please go and nominate your favorite narrator (me!), fave flash fiction or main fiction piece, and your fave poetry and fact contributor in the first 52 episodes of Aural Delights. You can go to the online poll or go to the forums (register) and post your favorites under one of the threads under "Sofanaughts". In each of the categories, the five entries with the most nominations will be short-listed for the run-off poll at a later date.

Go on! What are you waiting for?