Christmas Collection – 2007

The Bird’s Christmas Carol linked below just wasn’t enough.  Additions to the Public Domain for this December now include the following three seasonal sillinesses: A Cornish Christmas Play – recorded during a London LV meet, with four people, two rolling pins, a briefcase, a frying pan and no strict adherence to the script (just as its author intended.)… Read more »

Paradise Lost — yes, those Dark Materials

I recently lucked into recording a section of Paradise Lost. I wasn’t planning to get a literature-nerd crush on Milton, and I definitely wasn’t expecting to have to edit “oooooh, cool!” out of the middle of a recording, once I’d finished reading a particular paragraph.  But there’s a lot of unaccountable events in this life,… Read more »

A Christmas weepie

Yes, it is heading towards That Time of Year again … and though I have plans for something of Nesbit’s to celebrate the season (note to self – get that copyright clearance, ASAP!) I rescued a poor little orphan chapter too, part of The Birds’ Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin.  A sweet little children’s… Read more »

Sci-fi short stories aplenty

LibriVox Volumes 1 and 2 are now available to the public, ten stories in each … and now we’re busy filling up the third. I’ve contributed one story to each so far, and I’ll need to stock up with more readings, since these things tend to go quickly! The strangest thing about my contribution to… Read more »

Dedicated to insomniacs everywhere

http://librivox.org/insomnia-collection-vol-1/ I invented this before the Short Non-Fiction Collections came along, so it’s part-filled with people begrudgingly handing over things which THEY thought were really quite interesting, but conceded the rest of the world might find a bit nod-worthy.  I contributed the starting piece of fiction on Shakespeare’s Insomnia … which IS a spoof, even if it does quote… Read more »

Thomas Hardy, the poet

I’d never read any of Thomas Hardy’s poetry … it was enough to be forced through an entire novel (FFTMC) during GCSE English, and the bits of prose I’ve dipped into since convinced me to keep my distance.  Thoroughly gloomtastic is our Mr Hardy. But, given the opportunity to actually LOOK at his poetry, I… Read more »

Microwave your head with an audiobook

“There are tens of thousands of audiobooks available in the world, in various languages, ranging all the way from education to entertainment.” http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/audiobooks One thousand of those books are, of course, by LibriVox. In a kind acknowledgement of that, when demonstrating beta software, Nokia have converted a few LV books to play as minature-size audio… Read more »

Hear me – lots!

Just finished making a static page which lists and links all of my recordings so far. Since I’ve completed 179, this has taken a while. Still, it’s a good list. And hopefully keeping it current won’t be too complicated, since a fair bit of what I record now, I am also organising behind the scenes… Read more »

Beam up an LV community podcast!

This was a very random idea on Saturday morning, just before a very busy day offline commenced.  “Hey, no-one’s gotten dibs on this week’s podcast.  What could I do … hmm … ah, I know: something with crazy sci-fi sound effects.”  By that evening, I had some support for it … by Sunday morning I… Read more »

Bread Overhead: the first of many …

Sometimes, things just get a bit out of hand.  When a little sci-fi story by Fritz Leiber wasn’t renewed as per US copyright requirements, who knew that 49 years later, people around the world would leap upon it to record for audio posterity. My version is first into the catalogue, thanks to the editing of Mandarine.  (Here,… Read more »