Reflections on completing the Flores Girl Podcast.

I have conflicting emotions about the completion of my speculative fiction thriller Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot Podcast at Podiobooks. First, I’m glad to be done with the podcast since it has been hanging over my head for over a year and a half. I was about a third through the podcast when the sirens call of family responsibility took precedence over my writing muse. I assumed a position of responsibility with a large Fortune 100 company and to say that my time has been limited is an understatement. So the podcast was basically relegated to a weekend ritual at the end of my fifty to sixty hour week.

Because I didn’t have the foresight to cull the novel from the start, it is over 550 pages, I ended up recording 26 chapters for the podcast. Reading my novel aloud was an interesting exercise because it made it easy to spot glaring weaknesses in my narrative and prose. Yes, after my readings I did rewrite entire sections of the novel. That was the exception to the rule but tweaks to the story and rewriting were the norm as I recorded the podcast. Monotonous dialog tags that could be skipped as you read became a drone during the spoken narrative of the podcast. I learned a lot as I made way from podcast to podcast. Oh, did I mention that I began writing the sequel to the first novel about the same time? That added another layer of complexity to the process because it did kinda of make sense make the narrative consistent between the two novels. Plus I started the third and final novel as I gathered more ideas to complete the further adventures of the two pains in the butt I called Sarah and Richard.

I dutifully went through this exercise every weekend, taking hours to record the narrative and then I spent hours adding sound effects and music. And of course there was the requisite audio equipment failure that cost me a month of my time as the mike input on my trusted laptop decided to crap out altogether. What a pain in the ass!

Then there was the readers, I mean listeners to deal with. They keep harping about what was taking so long. Jeez, as if a month between podcasts is too long to wait? Well, of course they were right and then came the inevitable criticisms of the podcast. You talk too fast, you have a funny accent (what the hell do you expect, I’m from New Yawk), the volume is too low and so on. At first, you might be inclined to make a comment about you get what you pay for but the listeners are making a considerable investment, that is, in terms of their time. In my case they were listening to over 15 hours of podcast recordings. So think thick skin like a rhinoceros and you will be fine, otherwise watch out.

More to follow on the Podcast Experience.

The Expectations of Genre Definition: Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction is not fantasy fiction, as it rules out the use of anything as material which violates established scientific fact, laws of nature, call it what you will, i.e., it must [be] possible to the universe as we know it. – Robert A. Heinlein

One of the worst aspects of publishing work in a Web 2.0 world is the myriad tasks the author must undertake. Besides writing the crap the writer must undertake numerous sleazy marketing efforts. In the past that been relegated to the obligatory series of interviews and book signing, assuming that is if the author was lucky enough in his career or her to get to that point.

Today the challenges are different and far more varied. Most of the work still revolves around the writing, editing and marketing of the work. However the marketing piece of the puzzle is a bit of a quandary and requires the greatest flexibility on the part of the fledgling writer. Worse, it is also damn time consuming.

If you go the route of podcasting, which has its myriad appeals and challenges, it requires the author to do production work and possibly the biggest challenge of all: narrating the work. The web work can involve a site or minimally a blog for the author’s various fans to turn into. Besides words, structures these endeavors typically require some type of graphics, Search engine optimization and knowledge of key words; all daunting challenges for the uninitiated. If you have money you could have somebody else do it but you still must manage the ongoing mess.

The biggest marketing challenge could be the designation of your work into one of the existing genres. Why? That’s because the genre designation ultimately determines your readers and finally your choices among agents and publishers.

My problem was what the hell do you call Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot? An adventure story sort of describes it but there were some science fiction elements as well to the story. After all the core of the story is about the survival of Homo floresiensis on a small tropical island and that is speculative at best. In actuality these small three-foot tall hominids died out 12,000 years ago or maybe as recently as 400 years ago based on some early historical accounts. In any case, nobody expects them to be found alive and well today, at least not with the way China is clear cutting the forests of Southeast Asia. To call it science fiction would really disappoint the hardcore science fiction fans; you know not enough hardware and overall fantasy elements to keep them enthralled to quite honest with you. I mean if you can’t have sex with an alien then why bother calling it science fiction?

Then I came across the term speculative fiction and the Robert Heinlein definition. The definition seems appropriate fro my book but its usage and acceptance as part of the vernacular is no where near as universally accepted as science fiction. As a measure of popularity I did a search fro speculative fiction and turned up only a couple of million hits in Google. Compare that with science fiction with nearly 140 million hits and you have yourself a huge disparity in overall acceptance. So which sandbox do you want to play in, the larger one where you won’t get noticed or the smaller one with a much smaller audience? I’ll go with the one that is a better fit, thank you, speculative fiction. It maybe a smaller audience but in the long run hopefully it is the right one. I’ll let you know.