Audio on Ice

I've taken a hard look at my audiobook project and reluctantly decided to pull the plug on it for now. Oh, it would be great to have Sunborn available in audio format, and no doubt it would bring in new readers. It's something I enjoy doing, too—when I'm not feeling pressured to get it done, and to do it just so. But it was just taking too much time for too little result, and it was cutting way into my writing on the new book. So I'm putting it on ice for a while, or at least on the back burner.

I don't consider the time wasted, and I hope some people listened to and enjoyed the sample recording. (Besides those who have posted here, I mean.) I learned a lot in the process. One thing I learned is that it's not an easy thing to do well, and you need to spend almost as much time editing the recording of a chapter as you did editing the text in the first place. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but still. Another thing I learned is that I probably need better equipment—microphone, headphones, and so on. That will have to wait.

I do hope to return to it at some point. I may keep fiddling from time to time, to see if I can make the process go more smoothly. But for right now, I've put a lot of time into work that one way or another is to promote Sunborn. It's time I started putting more of my time into The Reefs of Time.


"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing." —John Steinbeck