Just a brief one today. Amnar: The Inheritance, with new prologue, has just launched on Podiobooks.com.
You can check it out here.
Enjoy!
Click on the picture to listen to the podcast
This is TGIAD 2.0, covering the release of the AMNAR podcast on my own website.
This week, it is meet the Capillites time, with Icaan and Anarya taking centre stage. They’re two very different people, and present Io with a challenge and an opportunity. She can make use of Anarya’s support, while Icaan represents the dominant view of the Capillites.
I do have to apologise that the sound recording on this episode is poor. I didn’t get to do the edit until today and found this grungey noise under half the track. I don’t have time to go back and re-record yet, although I will for the Podiobooks release.
Once again, I’m missing regular segments thanks to still dealing with the effects of depression.
This is very frustrating, as I’m currently working on a few different things at once, and can only do anything on days when I’m capable of getting up properly. I’ve never really been in the position where I have to do things through such a fog. It’s annoying.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this week’s episode, despite the noise!
It was the interview that almost never happened.
Rhonda and I ran into incredible technical issues when trying to do this Podioracket interview about Amnar: The Awakening on Podiobooks.
Skype has a lot to answer for, that’s all I can say.
In the meantime, I’ve spent all this morning getting the files ready for Amnar: The Inheritance to be launched over there, and preparing a covering letter to go and work at a publishing company.
So, er, go me, as they say. After yesterday’s bout of severe depression, I’ve been strangely active today.
Ah ha! Yes!
Today might have been messy and confusing in other ways, but since it was also relatively quiet, I got to writing.
The result?
The new prologue for Amnar: The Inheritance is done.
Not only that, but I did the recording and editing. Which is where it starts to get really exciting.
I’m very pleased with the new prologue, but I’m even happier with the recording. I took the time to scour what I could find on Garageband for free, and noticed there are a selection of tracks I could get but hadn’t downloaded.
I was very pleased with the result.
It’s not perfect, because I can’t afford any better than I can do right now. But it is good and I was pleased.
The best bit was finding just the most perfect music to use for every appearance of Isha. Since I’ve written in her appearance at the end of the book and was worried about finding the right tone for her, I’m really pleased the right music has landed in my lap by accident.
Tomorrow’s podcast will be later than usual because I’m in a training meeting all morning so I won’t get to it until later this afternoon.
But, here is something to look forward to for the release on Podiobooks.com. I’m pleased, and just a little proud at what I managed to put together.
I’m full of them right now.
Unexpectedly, I found myself working on the new prologue to The Inheritance today. This will go out on Podiobooks.com with the release (hopefully next week).
Then I ran slap bang into a language issue. Swearing.
This has come up before, years ago. I wrote a version of Amnar: 4765 that featured Arandes Nashima blowing his top in style that would curl even Tarantino’s ears. This raised the issue of swearing, because I used swearwords that we would understand. In the larger, more mainstream Amnar books, I keep the characters’ language pretty polite.
Swearing is a personal thing. Any swearwords in a podcast mean you have to warn listeners that it will be ‘explicit.’ Of course, this doesn’t apply to Amnari swearwords. So I could have Arandes swearing like the trooper he is and nobody would be any the wiser what he was saying. Except everybody clamouring to learn the language, of course.
The unfortunate thing about that is that because swearwords are used to pack an emotional punch, if they’re Amnari and nobody understands them, it’s harder to get them to swing their weight. Only an Amnari could stand to be genuinely offended.
I rarely use swearwords unless I’m really angry. I’m not one of those people who puts a “fuck” in front of everything, and completely diminishes the objective of using the word. When people swear in Amnar, it’s because they are really, really angry or at least highly emotional.
Having grown up at a time when films were actually edited for swearing, I know how ridiculous the ’safe’ alternatives sound. Instead of being filled with outrage, actors sounded mildly annoyed, as though somebody had put slightly too much milk in their tea as opposed to killing their best friend.
The new prologue calls for a full-on Arandes moment with blistering swearing as his temper goes off like fireworks. Amnari words or English words? Somehow, the flow brought out some good old fashioned English words that won’t trip the unwary listener up with unknown language. I also can’t have Arandes say “That unpleasant woman” when what he says in my head is “That ignorant fucking whore.”
It means I have to put an explicit tag on the first podcast, but this doesn’t bother me much. In fact, some people would argue that makes it more interesting and edgy.
So not only am I leaving in a character nobody knows and will spend the rest of the book feeling confused about (until at some point next year, the next book reaches the podcast world), but you’ll also be treated to an Arandes explosion. Or an arandasplosion, if you like.
A text from my friend (who co-owns my website):
“95GB downloads so far this August! Off to a funeral, enjoy the weather. H.”
A bit of maths works out that between Podiobooks.com and Amnar.co.uk, we have had about 26,400 downloads of the Amnar podcast since the launch on Podiobooks in the latter half of July.
Amnar is still hovering around places 1 or 2 in the Podiobooks.com top ten as I write this, although it’s fighting it out with Borrowed Time. I’m about to start working on the audiobook remastered version. Amnar: The Inheritance will go live on Podiobooks.com shortly.
So a big thank you to all the fans and listeners, and all the new people listening in and putting up with the rather scrappy narration of the first book.
Now, I’m off to watch the Coronation Street crew doing their work. I’ve even been invited to dinner with them all, so I feel very excited and wish I’d done my hair.
Podcasting is the In Thing in writing right now. I started doing it just over a year ago, and since the release of Amnar: The Awakening on Podiobooks.com, and Amnar’s general rise in popularity, I can see what a benefit it is to my life and my writing.
A great many people still blanch at the idea of giving away an entire book for free, but as J C Hutchins has already made clear in a post I now can’t find, it’s a brilliant way of building up an audience, and those crucial people, the dedicated fans who will support you no matter what.
Here’s a little of what I’ve discovered through podcasting Amnar to the world.
Improving my writing
If you read your work aloud, it is much, much easier to see where you repeat yourself, where your tones and rhythms work and don’t, and whether your dialogue sounds true.
It also becomes more obvious what’s actually interesting and worth fitting into your work and what really doesn’t belong there. Over the last few months, I’ve drastically cut down the length of my books, and my chapters. Amnar books are now tighter, more sharply written than ever before.
You learn to develop the art of the cliffhanger.
My mother, who was an editor many moons ago, commented this early on in my writing, that I had the trick of the cliffhanger. I didn’t realise how important it was until I began podcasting and started getting messages from listeners desperate to know what happens next.
Cliffhangers aren’t just the kind of thing you put in soaps. They’re part of what keep readers moving from page to page, chapter to chapter. I end every chapter with a cliffhanger of some kind. I’m also the evil kind of writer who does awful things to characters in the last moments and then moves on to another subplot for the next chapter, so you are held in tension all that time, wanting to know what’s going to happen.
Interacting with the audience
Editors are there to tell you about the technical side of your writing. Where characters have dramas, crises and revelations. They’re the people who’re supposed to say, “I like the way you used that word to bring out Vasha’s angst…”
Your readers are the ones who’re going to give the really vital feedback. Something like this:
“I fucking hate Arist. She’s a bitch. Please make her die.”
Or:
“What the hell have you done to Zoriel! You utter bitch, you’re going to kill him off, aren’t you! How dare you!”
This is the kind of thing you want from readers. It means they believe in your characters. I don’t want to hear from readers that they ‘appreciate’ the language as much as I want to know who they love and why, and who they hate.
There really is nothing like an irate email from somebody demanding to know why their favourite person died. That tells you that you’ve done something crucial: you’ve created a world that’s real and believable.
Having your mind quietly blown
While I have huge, fantastical ambitions, when it comes to assessing how I think things will really go, I tend to be much more modest. In fact, I was pretty certain that Amnar would fall flat on its face on general release.
It is, however, picking up the kind of fans who will refuse to put up with you even when you’re acting out in the extreme, doing all the things that would fit in a great book on how to lose fans and alienate people. That’s kind of weird for somebody who’s spent most of the last ten years convinced that anything she wrote would fail, and fail badly.
I guess it made me rather uncomfortable when people liked it that much they were prepared to donate to it, or support it, or email me when I was feeling miserable, or demand a book version, or even being prepared to wait for the book. Some people have been waiting for five and a half years.
I wrote Amnar exclusively for me, because it’s the world I have in my head and I love. I’m currently preparing to start work on an MP3 remastered release of The Awakening as an audiobook, to be sold rather than released for free. I have no idea how that will go, but it’ll be interesting to find out.
These are the things that make podcasting an exciting thing to be doing right now. It’s an interaction with writing on a new level, and with people on a new level. It’s well worth the education to try it out.
One of my listeners/readers who is up to date on Amnar: The Inheritance tells me he just can’t believe I’m evil enough.
Well, that’s a problem.
And he’s right, too, which makes it worse. Not that I’m a fluffy nice person through and through. I’m just not given to the kind of mass murderings, machievellian political shenanigans of my bad guys. And unfortunately, it kind of shows.
Since it emerged that on this go around the block I would include Tiom himself in the story, rather than leave him out until the end, I did a lot of work on dictators and historical figures that might give me some inspiration.
I have to admit to being seriously intimidated by the idea of creating a bad guy that you’d actually meet, at least at first. I’ve always liked to keep Amnar away from the traditional, black and white concepts of good and evil. They don’t work for me when I’m reading, so I’m not using them when I write.
Books like Lord of the Rings keep the evil pretty simple. It’s clear-cut that one of the main reasons why the bad guys are bad is a certain resentment of good, per se, and judging by the film adaptation, a really poor dental policy for Orc minions (although Sauron must be subsidising the tattoo-and-body-piercing parlours in Mordor).
We don’t even really meet Sauron or have much understanding of his motives other than a mad lust for power and destruction. Other evil characters always seem to have the sort of chronic social problems that a good few years of therapy might well resolve (I doubt anything could be done for Voldemort’s nose, or lack thereof, though).
I’ve come across a lot of work on our own collection of eminent evil, especially since my father is a historian and seems to devote worrying quantities of time frowning at books with moustachioed dictators on the cover.
Recent work on Chairman Mao suggests that Communist ideology was just a cunning route to get more women, power and drugs, and Stalin was intensely paranoid, which led to the massive lists of people to be murdered by the Politburo. Both he and Hitler played others off against each other, maintaining a constant atmosphere of fear and back-stabbing which would obviously keep the underdogs where they were.
Oddly, after all this, Tiom just walked in fully formed when I began writing his scenes a few weeks ago. I’ve mentioned elsewhere (and now can’t find the link) that the self-work and therapy had put me in touch with a deeper, darker side and had improved my understanding and interest in the ‘evil guys’ in Amnar.
Now, Tiom emerged fully formed. I won’t give away any details but I’m starting to form stronger impressions of the complexity behind the scenes within the Tiomke camp, as opposed to the Amnari world. It’s important to me (and to all writers) that a clear balance is maintained.
It’s no good having beautiful and amazing good guys who are flawless, and evil that either isn’t nasty enough or doesn’t offer a credible threat that the reader can believe in. Since Amnar is a complex world with complex people, so the Tiomke side has to be just the same.
This still doesn’t resolve the basic problem of my fundamental lack of evil. I don’t even litter, which is pretty pathetic by the standards of the mass-murdering sadists I’m always reading about. It’s one of the awful problems of reading your own work online. If people know you, often they find it difficult to place you as the characters you’re reading.
If I had the money I’d get somebody to read the lines for me for the characters whose evil must be clearly expressed. Alas, until then, everybody will just have to use their imaginations and pretend I really am that bad.
It’s TGIAD, or Thank God It’s Amnar Day (so named by the great Toaster Ferret). I release the next chapter in the book Amnar: The Awakening, and take a moment here to write about what happens in the episode here on the blog.
If you’re new to all this, you can download the first book, Amnar: The Awakening, from Podiobooks.com.
We’re now into Amnar: The Inheritance, the second book in The Awakening series. You can subscribe by clicking on the picture to the left.
Big News!
Amnar: The Inheritance podcasts are now in MP3 format! By pure chance I ran into the solution to the problem of the podcast format transition from Garageband to iWeb.
And it was despite, not because of the Apple website recommendation.
However, all of that is now sorted, so from now on Amnar podcasts from the website will be available in MP3 rather than MOV format.
Meanwhile…
Vasha spends most of this episode trapped between the wiles of Destorva and Arandes as they face off.
Vasha is something of a quiet evangelist for the Tiomke cause. He really believes they will change the world and that’s what allows him to bear the brutality that he has witnessed – and indeed, is partially responsible for.
Arandes shakes him up, because he is still used to the idea that people are basically who they say they are. Destorva gives him the same irksome feeling that nothing is as it seems.
In fact, in this chapter, Destorva and Arandes seem so alike it’s impossible to tell that they’re playing for opposite sides. This leaves Vasha confused by the end. He wants to believe in the fundamental goodness of everybody, and neither of these two powerful representatives of their respective regimes offer him any kind of comfort.
As usual, I’m terrible when it comes to remembering important things. If you didn’t notice, there are new t-shirts in the Amnar store. We even have a mug.
Click on the picture to listen to the podcast
If you’d asked me, a week ago, how many people I honestly thought listened to the Amnar podcast, I’d have suggested 10, maybe 12.
When I first spoke to the man who has been so helpful with my PR in the last couple of weeks I suggested maybe a couple of hundred, but I thought that was pushing it. To be honest, beyond the people who write to me or chat to me on Twitter, I really didn’t think anybody was listening.
This is very bad form for somebody on the internet, but I don’t have access to the statistics for my website (it isn’t owned by me), so my first insight into how many people paid attention to Amnar came when it was released on Podiobooks.com.
It went to Number 1 for daily downloads, and then spent a week at Number 2. I was, quite frankly, stunned. I didn’t check the statistics for a week, but it left my eyes bulging to see over 2000 downloads in just a few days. I sent a message to H, who owns my site, and he got back to say we had 40GB of downloads for July.
A little bit of math tells me that if you combine downloads for both sites we’re talking more than 5,500 downloads. In a month.
I had to take a breather at that point.
Generally, I’ve noted on the web that people pay a lot of attention to statistics and noticing how well they’re doing. I’m actually glad I didn’t. I’m also glad that I had low expectations – although possibly not as low as I did have – for Amnar.
I’ve kept my real expectations for Amnar much lower than my imagination will allow. Instead of constantly tracking how well I appear to be doing, I’ve been totally focused on work. And I think a lot of the success has been down to just that kind of work ethic.
It began with the realisation that as long as I was hunting for work, I needed something else to do that would make me feel more positive. Once I was working toward putting the Manchester tweet-up together, I had a goal to concentrate on.
And that expanded outward into learning the new Liberated Syndication system, putting together a good business process for the podcasts on the site and generally spending every hour I could looking for opportunities.
Instead of sitting around feeling frustrated and miserable, I felt as though at least I was working, and on a learning curve so steep it was almost vertical.
I took it quite seriously, too. I made notes on what I did, what worked and what didn’t as I interacted with people helping me. A lot of time was spent thinking of “ways to do things better next time” and responding to opportunities that came along as I was spending all day with Twitter open and available.
I found myself spotting things I’d never noticed before, which led to connections with Businesslink, MDDA, Salford Hundred Venture and a host of other organisations and individuals. I’m still at the start of this, too, but I’ve never felt so good about being so busy.
Several years of working in business as an analyst and consultant has pretty much nailed my feet to the floor as far as expectations are concerned, but when it comes to getting on with it, keeping on with the work I need to do and responding to everything that comes up as I can.
Now seems to be a time of regrouping, and reassessing where I’ve reached so far. It’s been an intense month, and it’s not even over yet.
OR... Listen to the latest podcast, AMNAR: THE INHERITANCE:
All images and writing are fully copyright to Isabel Joely Black (Joely Black Ltd) 2009.
