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Post by Kilarin on Jun 21, 2007 9:16:55 GMT -5
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Post by Liantedan on Jun 21, 2007 15:28:58 GMT -5
Unless there's been a new addition to Xaa's books at CaféPress that I'm unaware of, I have read them all at least twice. (With Apotheosis still at the lead with 11 readings, because I bought that one first.)
As to asking me which one's my favorite... That one fiendishly difficult question, Kilarin. I think my answer would be Mage I or Mage III, but I just love the entire series. Ah, who am I kidding, I love 'em all. ;D
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Post by Kilarin on Jun 21, 2007 16:21:48 GMT -5
Liantedan: Wow! that puts you way ahead of me. I've only read about 1/3rd of Xaa's books. I haven't tried the Mage series, I may have to dip into that one next. Although I was seriously considering going through the entire Oerth cycle again. I read them spaced apart last time through, I think I'd like to try the entire thing at one sweep. Get the grand scale of the whole epic. I'm also going to try and get my wife hooked. She just got a fancy schmancy e-reader for mothers day, but it won't handle html. I'll probably try converting my html copies of the Oerth series into pdf format for it. I HATE pdf, but the reader likes them. If that doesn't work out, I can always just strip them to text. the reader handles text files just fine (She's going through Gutenberg's entire library right now) Speaking of reading. Have you considered putting your books up for sale in audio versions Xaa? I've been enjoying Librivox audio books as mp3's on those days when they make me drive into the office. It would be cool to have some Xaa books to listen to while driving/mowing/gardening.
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Post by Xaa on Jun 24, 2007 10:04:28 GMT -5
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Post by Xaa on Jun 24, 2007 10:11:10 GMT -5
Speaking of reading. Have you considered putting your books up for sale in audio versions Xaa? I've considered it, but the problem is that most of my books are so large they won't fit on a single CD in audio-version. Or even on a reasonable number of CD's/cassettes. See, a normal rate of speech is about 150 words a minute. Taking Pandora's Box as an example, the book is 184,000 words long. You're looking at a bit over 20 hours of reading. Then, there's my Magnum Opus, "The Ship's Cat", which is about 450,000 words long. At a normal rate of speech, that's about 50 hours of reading. Most audio books are very short so that they fit on one disk or one cassette, at an hour's worth of reading. That's an upper limit of about 9000 words per disk. For major book series (like Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series, which is available on a set of CD's), they often heavily edit the books so as to try to cram them onto fewer CD's or casettes to keep the price within the "something reasonable" range. I'm not really willing to edit my works so that they fit better onto CD's or casettes, nor am I willing to try to foist off a set of 50 CD's for a book like Ship's Cat. Incidentally, this is also why it takes me so long to proof and polish the books I do. My latest release, "Headborough" (Book 6 of Pandora's Box) is about 120,000 words long. I proof it by reading it aloud to my wife, and reading through the book aloud takes about 13 hours.
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Post by Kilarin on Jun 24, 2007 12:27:27 GMT -5
Mp3! I do all of my audio books in mp3 format now and play them on my mp3 player. You can fit a LOT of audio book into an mp3 player. Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress, BOTH book 1 and and 2, unabridged: 223MB. At Librivox, Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the sea" is only 475.5MB, again, unabridged.. I got an el-cheapo mp3 player with 2gig of storage for around $40. You can get them even cheaper. So it's pretty easy to fit even a long book onto an mp3 player in it's entirety. Even a 50 hour read would fit onto my cheapo player. Long books are Better! Oh, and congratulation on "Headborough"!
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Post by Xaa on Jun 24, 2007 13:28:58 GMT -5
Mp3! I do all of my audio books in mp3 format now and play them on my mp3 player. You can fit a LOT of audio book into an mp3 player. True. I'll look into it.
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Post by Liantedan on Jun 25, 2007 5:54:39 GMT -5
Mp3! I do all of my audio books in mp3 format now and play them on my mp3 player. Thanks for the tip. I spent some time checking the list of books they have and got a few. It should be fun to *read a book* while walking into town and not tripping occasionally. True. I'll look into it. Oooooh! I can hardly wait for Xaa to tell me a bedtimestory now! ;D
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Post by Kilarin on Jun 25, 2007 7:13:53 GMT -5
Yeah, Librivox is great. Lots of fantastic free unabridged audiobooks there. I've got an hour commute on the days they make me drive into the office, having audiobooks to listen too helps. And I happen to LIKE the old classics. But yes... That would be VERY cool!
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Post by Xaa on Jun 29, 2007 11:32:25 GMT -5
That would be VERY cool! I try not to make promises I can't keep, but yes, I am trying to get a cheap microphone so I can play around with the notion.
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Post by Kilarin on Jun 30, 2007 23:45:36 GMT -5
Nifty! By the way, if you haven't found it, there is an entire section over at Librivox giving advice on how to record books. <link>
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Post by Xaa on Jul 1, 2007 0:03:12 GMT -5
Please note that I do mean 'play around' at this point. I have *NEVER* liked how my voice sounds when recorded. Ever. Not even a tiny bit. Incidentally, the "storyteller's voice" I hear in my head varies based on what I'm working on. For the Mage series, it's usually James Earl Jones, with occasional visits by Keith David (the guy who did the voice for Goliath in the Gargoyles animated series). For the Oerth Cycle, it was the late Greer Garson (she was the storyteller for the old "Little Drummer Boy" movie). I also sometimes hear Miss Garson's voice when I'm working on the "Pandora's Box" series. The "Muse" series is the most difficult one - I hear Fred Ward as the storyteller and voicing Allan's lines (and if you don't know what he sounds like I can't describe it), with Greer Garson reading Elizabeth's chapters, but Yeardly Smith (who does Lisa Simpson) voicing all of Liz' lines. Sometimes Yeardly's voice kind of nudges out Greer in my head when doing Liz' chapters, but it still works.
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Post by Liantedan on Jul 1, 2007 3:13:10 GMT -5
Please note that I do mean 'play around' at this point. Yeah, but it's still a lot more interesting than "I'm not even considering it", so we're just being hopeful, though we know it's just a possibility, not a certainty. Most people don't. There's even singers out there who dislike the sound of their own voice, yet, they sound great. You shouldn't go with what you think of your voice, since you are biased towards the sound you hear when listening as being quite different from the sound you hear when speaking. It would be better to have your wife, who knows your voice best, to say whether or not we'd like hearing your voice.
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Post by Xaa on Jul 1, 2007 8:56:10 GMT -5
It would be better to have your wife, who knows your voice best, to say whether or not we'd like hearing your voice. Said the single guy. When a woman decides she loves you, she loves all of you. Things that she finds about you that bother her are usually things that other people will never notice (like whether or not you put the toilet seat back down) or general behavioral things that annoy women no matter how handsome you are (like watching football and drinking beer with your buddies instead of mowing the lawn). As the old saying goes, "Love Is Blind." Which is good, because if women could really see us for what we are, there'd be a lot more lesbians in the world. The reason why I don't like the way my voice sounds is because the difference between how it sounds in my ears and how it sounds on tape is so stark. When I'm talking to someone, what I hear in my ears is a mellow bass that reminds me of Keith David. What I hear when I playback a recording is a flat tenor with a bit of gravel that sounds like William Katt with a cold. I speak with a more-or-less midwestern accent, liberally peppered with the occasional odd pronunciations here and there caused by living all around the world when I was a kid.
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Post by Liantedan on Jul 1, 2007 15:15:03 GMT -5
When a woman decides she loves you, she loves all of you. And that's exactly why I said that, just in the hopes you wouldn't realize that. Silly me. I guess that shows just how much we'd like to hear you tell us that bedtimestory after all. And that's the exact same reason nearly everyone dislikes the sound of their own voice, when they hear it without speaking it. So just because of that, you can't really tell whether or not your voice will sound good or bad to us. That's why you should ask a third party. (I suggested your wife as judge just to increase the chance you'd record it yourself...)
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