Early Podcasting Attempts

'

'

'

'

I've wanted to podcast for a very long time, and have come up with multiple ideas over the years...failing of course, to pursue any of them.  For a while, I was going to read, in one thousand and one nights, the desperate chronicles of Scheherezade by the same name.  I did not take into account the facts that, a)1001 nights is a hell of a commitment, and b)that the edition I had was an antiquated one that put even me to sleep, and that c)I had a dramatic inflection not at all suited to reading fiction, being both monotone and suicidal in its affect.  Other ideas included doing an audio blog instead of just writing out these reflections, and I'm sure I came up with other ideas that I did nothing at all to pursue.

 '

But I keep returning to the idea of audio fiction.  I am a lover of the short story, in both audio and written formats, and habitually listed to Miette (www.miettecast.com) and the roster of actors who read for PRI's Selected Shorts (www.pri.org/selected-shorts.html). 

'

I asked a couple of actor friends whether they would be interested in reading with me, and got their buy-in.  I talked about it with non-actor friends, who were interested in reading with me, and gave their buy-in.  All that remained was for me to curate the selection of short stories, and to begin with handling the logistics.  I curated, and had a healthy list to start with, thinking that if I could keep a few weeks ahead, I would be fine and could continue adding selections from my reading life.

'

My friend Greg, one of the aforementioned actor friends, and a tumblr person (who you can find hugging panthers here), eventually settled for a few months in New York, and we decided to make our first attempt at an audio podcast.  He came over to record our first short story.  I set up GarageBand, with which I had only a passing, wary familiarity, and a microphone I had borrowed from a workmate until I could invest in my own (if this passion, unlike many passing others, stuck).

'

We riffled through a few of my anthologies, and, confronted with too many choices for him to pick from, I picked one of my favorite Raymond Carver stories, Cathedral.  Greg began to read it, and didn't like it quite so much, the sentences being too short for his taste and therefore requiring much in the way of starting and stopping.

'

We tried a few others, but ran into trouble with trying to set down more than 30 minutes of audio fiction without rehearsing, and in Greg's case, without familiarity with the story.  Eventually, boredom beat dedication, and we abandoned (at least for the night), the quest for adding our own brand of audio fiction to the vast world of the Internet.

'

Greg then had the idea that we could just podcast about the world at large, and that people, presumably all over America and the world, would find this both intriguing and worth following religiously.  I was unsure of our mass market appeal, but being that it was late and there was not much else to do, agreed to record one episode.  Here's how it went down.

'

I seem to find hilarious anything and everything Greg has to express.  Needless to say, I don't think that this is quite as general interest as Greg was hoping for.  Please stay tuned for such time as we can get the audio fiction podcast up and running!  Any and all motivation is accepted, up to and including monetary contributions.
'
'