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.

..................

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?