Muse News #5: 360 Audio Book Beta & Kiranan's Crucible "Pantsing Strategy"

There's not much to report this week, but that limited news in itself is quite exciting nonetheless  - well, from my perspective it is!

Audio Edition

My humble recording setup
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

With the fourth draft of 360 now in the hands of most of my wonderful beta-readers, I've turned my attention to working on the audio book version.  It isn't meant as a serious attempt at a commercially available audio book.  Recording an audio edition simply allows another two beta-readers (or should that be beta-listeners?) access to it and it provides me with the opportunity to review the story from a new angle.

Reading with the inner-voice my head, I'm prone to skip missing words, miss grammatical errors and gloss over badly constructed sentences.  Reading aloud helps me spot those errors and iron out the difficult, or clumsy dialogue.

And trust me, there's plenty of clumsy dialogue.  I've managed three recording sessions so far this week and almost driven myself mad recording some sections more than a dozen times.  I fear that by the time I finish recording the whole thing, if I'd kept the bloopers they'd be longer than the book itself!

Having said that, I have already recorded 20 of the 170 scenes, so I envisage that the remainder will take another three weeks if I continue at the current pace.

Kiranan's Crucible

As indicated in other posts on this blog, I've returned to the fantasy project that I started last year, but shelved in favour of preparing 360 for publication.  I need something to keep me occupied while 360 is being read.

Kiranan's Crucible is planned be the first of a series of an as-yet unknown number of books (or it might be the title of the whole series).  What had appeared initially to the plot of the first of the series, has - following further planning - rapidly turned it into the plot for the second book and an entirely new first book has emerged along with ideas for a third (and possibly more)

I'm still only at the planning stage, and by that I mean planning of the major plot points.  I'm not a natural "pantser" and prefer to plan my plots to quite detailed levels, but I often find myself going off-piste when I actually start writing, liking what I've then written and scrambling to rejig the remaining plot to absorb the new ideas from the new sections.

I imagine that's going to be a nightmare with a series, so instead of plot planning I'm going to world build as much as I can in advance and assemble with plot of each book as I go with only major plot points in place to guide me.  It might work, or it might all go horribly wrong.  Either way the, results should be entertaining...

This week promises much of the same as this week, but you never know.  I may have driven myself insane recording and listening to my own voice for hours on end and the planner in me may have quelled the pantser in me.

Find out in the next Muse News!