Sounds thrilling!
It’s happening! The super talented team at Pretty Neat Productions just finished recording their audio-drama version of Calyptra Mortiferum, and it sounds pretty darned good!
As you might imagine, I’m beyond excited to have one of my stories adapted like this and it gives me the good kind of shivers to think of it reaching a whole new audience.
Working with the PNP team to adapt the book to audio script format was exciting and frankly a complete riot. We had a blast, and hopefully that will come across to listeners.
If you’re a fan of the original story you’ll notice some changes, but I hope you agree with me that they only enhance the creepy factor!
PNP reckon we’re about a month away from release, and you can hear a preview snippet here. Stay tuned for the launch, plus future book-to-audiodrama collaborations!
It’s all a bit hazy...
August 21st 2023
Vancouver’s under a smoky haze for the second day, and I’m finding my mind’s gone fuzzy too. Obviously, my sympathy is with the people from Yellowknife and Kelowna who are worried about a lot more than a little woodsmoke. But here on the coast, removed from the worst of things, tasting only a trace of the destruction, it’s all a little surreal.
What does it mean to be writing apocalyptic scenes in a fantasy world, when people are living through something similar here and now? If reading is escapism, are writers guilty of helping a whole generation bury their heads in the sand?
I don’t think so. For one thing, that escapism can give you the moment of clear air you need to gather your strength and continue when you thought you were spent. For another, living imaginatively through the challenges of a burning world is a rehearsal.
We’ve all done fire drills. They’re useful, but the one thing missing, the thing they’re criticised for most often, is the emotion, or lack of it. In a real fire, people panic. And they forget the drill.
Books, stories, any imagined situations that become real for us in the moment, offer us a chance to face infernos with all the emotion of the real situation, but the chance for a do-over, a do-differently, each time we read and imagine. This is preparation for the emotional infernos we are all likely to come across in our real lives, as well as the sort of dramatic, physical ones most of us hopefully won’t.
So I sit here gazing at the smoke haze outside my window, thinking about burning worlds, and hoping we figure out a few do-overs soon.