Luzula

1) I got some lovely feedback on Librivox, which I treasure all the more since it's a site which is not set up for easily giving feedback: Just wanted to send a note saying how much I have enjoyed listening to you read D.K. Broster's works. I have stuck with them solely for the last few weeks and these fine stories have made my summer so enjoyable. Please please consider recording, Ships in the Bay also. Thanks!! Aww, I'm sure the listener will be happy that Gleam in the North is almost completed, then! I won't be recording Ships in the Bay!, but I might at some point record Sir Isumbras at the Ford and The Yellow Poppy.

2) I have bound a volume of all my stories which are not in due South and adjacent fandoms, nor in Flight of the Heron and adjacent fandoms, and rereading one story a day at bedtime. I am so happy to be able to enjoy my own stories! Considering that they are written to my own taste, perhaps that isn't strange, but I can't relisten to my own podfic the same way. Of course, there are also occasional old stories that I regret. The main one is a due South casefic I once wrote that had migrant workers as victims with little agency, where we never even found out what their fates were. /o\ Since I am now active in a union where I regularly interact with migrant workers and help out with negotiations, I could never have written that today. But I don't write in that fandom anymore and doubt I can find the inspiration to rewrite it. Ah well, you live and learn, and hopefully I’ve paid back. I've put a note on the story to that effect.

3) I haven't been engaging much with all the OTW stuff, though I will be voting in the election. I just have too much stuff going on in my environmental organization, where I am on the board, to engage in conflicts and problems in other organizations.

4) I was talking with garonne about wingfic and my impression that this trope is out of fashion and not common anymore. Then I went to AO3 and looked at the 7,370 fics tagged with "Wingfic". If I sort by date posted, and go to the middle page, I see that half of those fics are posted after August 2019. Of course one then has to consider the general growth of AO3, but perhaps I have to discard my notion of it being out of fashion...it might just be out of fashion in my corner of fandom. Hmm.

Flight of the Heron:
A Grimly Ghost, by regshoe (Keith/Ewen, 2h 2m)
Steadfast Unto Death by me (Keith/Ewen and Ewen/Alison, 3h 11m)
Three Strands, Braided Together (Keith/Ewen/Alison, 11h 14m)
No Man Can Shun It by regshoe (1h 3m)

Other podfic:
Known Associates by thingswithwings (Avengers, 9h 18m)
Les oiseaux que l’hiver exile by ellenfremedon (19th century France RPF, Jacques-Antoine Manuel/Pierre-Jean de Béranger, PG-13, 1h 46m)

Librivox audiobook:
The Wounded Name by D K Broster (17h 4m)

Total time: 45h 38m.

I took a break from recording in December, which I think was good. It was also good to record Known Associates, for a completely different style. Next year's projects: continue recording my longfic WIP Three Strands as I go, and record D K Broster’s Gleam in the North, which will come out of copyright next year!

I am going to record D K Broster's The Wounded Name for Librivox. If you haven't read it, it is slashy hurt/comfort set during the Napoleonic wars. I sold it to sovay like this: Waterloo happens off stage while the main characters share a bed in a cave and make anguished confessions.

Would anyone like to prooflisten for me? This is an obligatory part of making a Librivox audiobook, but it doesn't mean you have to check the reading against the text. You just have to check that each section has the correct intro/outro and that there are no obvious editing errors.

Only do this if you think you would enjoy it! You don't need to do it as a favor to me, since it's not hard to find prooflisteners at Librivox. (Though it might happen that the one who volunteers thinks Flight of the Heron has a happy ending after listening to the whole thing...)

Flight of the Heron podfic and audiobooks:
No Unfitting Anchorage, by regshoe: Keith/Ewen, 1 h 12 min
Audiobook of Flight of the Heron itself by D K Broster: Keith/Ewen, Ewen/Alison, 12 h 42 min
Cameron of Ardroy's Last Goodnight by regshoe: Keith/Ewen, 3 min
Divided Loyalties: Keith/Ewen, 5 h 42 min

Other podfic and audiobooks:
An Ever-Fixed Mark, by AMarguerite: Pride & Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet/Richard Fitzwilliam, Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy, 19 h 56 min
That Looks on Tempests, by AMarguerite: Pride & Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet/Richard Fitzwilliam, Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy, 5 h 26 min
I'll Mount the Air on Swallow's Wings by regshoe: f/f for Song Composed in August - Robert Burns, 53 min
Audiobook of "Mr Rowl", by D K Broster, 14 h 11 min

Well, that is certainly a lot. A record for me when it comes to length, in fact: that's about 60 hours! But the FotH audiobook was recorded in 2020; OTOH I have about 4 hours recorded and unposted. Out of these, I think the Pride & Prejudice podfics were the most fun! Of course I don't have a British accent, but I would be much more intimidated with something modern and British--with something that's set 200 years ago, people probably didn't sound like today anyway. The pod_together collaboration with regshoe was fun, too, with all the singing I got to do. Also Mr Rowl, for which I thank regshoe for the proof-listening. With Divided Loyalties, I think I was perhaps a little tired of the text when I recorded it, but it came out well, I hope.

So I'm recording my recent longfic, and wondering if I should keep the chapter breaks, or just read on. And if I do keep the chapter breaks, should I make each chapter into a different file? The whole thing will be about five and a half hours, and there are eight chapters as well as a prologue and epilogue. So that's a little more than half an hour per chapter, on average.

I know most people probably listen by streaming these days, right? Me, I still download the files and put them on my mp3-player (yes, I'm old-school), so I don't like files that are too large, because if I lose my place, I can't find it again. But OTOH, I don't know if it will bother people who stream if I do have multiple half-hour files, and put them all in a folder on box.com? This is the way I usually do it for long podfics, though the files are usually larger.

Some time ago (a fairly long time ago, it feels like), I was talking about collaborating on a podfic of The Land of Lost Content by desireearmfeldt and, hmm, another author who seems to have orphaned the work. mific wanted to do Fraser, and I seem to remember andeincascade expressing interest in Stella? Possibly malnpudl was involved in the idea as well? I hardly remember any more. Anyway, I recorded all the Kowalski parts, and they have languished in my WIP folder. But it seems a shame to never finish this! I am convinced it would make a great podfic, especially with the soundtrack.

So. I am emailing the people whom I asked originally--are you guys interested? And if you're someone else who's reading this and are interested in taking part (all the original people might not still be interested), please chime in. : )

I'm dogsitting at my parents' house this weekend, and it's proving a quite productive weekend. Besides dog-cuddling, dog-walking, and crossing various RL tasks off my to-do list, I have done the following fannish things:

- finished the draft of my C6DVD card and sent it to beta
- beta-read seascribe's delicious Vecchio/Cortez fic (do go read it!)
- posted my Pod-Together lightning round podfic, which is a collaboration with feroxargentea (the collection won't be revealed until January 31st, though)
- watched Pacific Rim on my parent's huge flat-screen TV, which I was inspired to do by this vid, which was recently recced by cantarina. OMG, go watch that vid, it's so good! And I quite enjoyed the movie, although it felt kind of weird with a live-action mecha movie--I think of it as an anime genre. Would take recs for gen fics about Mako Mori?

Sooo, around this time last year I ran the due South podfic exchange. I don't think I'll be running it this year, because I'm kind of busy. What do you guys say? Would you be sad if I don't? I'll gladly give it to someone else to mod if there's anyone who wants to take it over--it doesn't really take a lot of energy to mod, just some familiarity with the AO3 challenge interface.

Right, I have made a separate AO3 account for my podfic: Luzula_podfic.

I wanted to be able to see my podfic fandoms and tags and statistics separately from the ones for my fics, and if I used a pseud for it, then the statistics would still get mushed together. Plus, you can't easily link to a pseud (as above). The drawback is that my podfic username has to be qualified with "podfic", while my fic account has no qualifier, like fic is obviously the main and most important thing I do, which is not true. But I created a "Luzula" pseud at the podfic account, to counteract this as far as I could.

Er, don't expect much to go up there soon, though--there's just a couple of podfics that had to be posted to AO3 for challenges, as well as some collaborations that other people have posted. I'm waiting on separate media categories at AO3 before I upload the bulk of my stuff, because I have tons of podfics, and uploading and then having to edit afterwards would just be unnecessary work. My podfic index is still the best way to find my podfic.