Wednesday, September 24, 2025

This is the ninetieth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. There are still a few more stories to finish up our end-of-Summer tour!

The Avalon Lost audiobook is the result of a collaboration between myself and Mary Rose Kreger, which came about when we were both at an online convention and I thought “hey, wouldn’t it be fun to narrate Avalon Lost?” It wasn’t a completely random idea, since I had been involved in the process of the book from early on.

I’d read an early draft, then participated in the official beta reading. Mary Rose has been involved in my own publishing journey as well, as both of the major stories that have recommendation blurbs have some from her! It seemed like a good first step in the audiobook production skill tree that I wanted to develop. As it turned out, the production ended up being a story itself.

The contract for the project was signed in October of 2024, and just as I began, I got pretty sick. Enough that I couldn’t really record anything at all for several months. That pushed the target date back a bit, but only by another month. Then there was the accents.

The book is set in modern Wales, Scotland, and the mythical island of Avalon, but it didn’t really occur to me until planning out the project that none of the characters were actually American, and therefore they would all have some variation of a British accent. Philia and her mother have strong Welsh accents, the stylish yet tricky Hamish Lee and his children have Northern Scottish accents, and everyone from Avalon has a BBC English accent.

Oh, let’s not forget about wise Master Raven, whose time in multiple worlds gave him an accent that I modeled after Taff from 1232, and Philia’s aunt Tiaras, who is from a different mythical island altogether. If Avalon is the magical counterpart of Britain, then Valeria is the counterpart of France, which gives her that kind of accent too. Whew!

Fortunately, after listening to many podcasts and interviews, I was able to make it all work. It also wasn’t exactly the easy training mission that I had thought it would be, but I still learned a great deal about how to record, edit, and master spoken word audio. I think the final product turned out great, but, as I often say, don’t take my word for it:

How about that? I have no idea what my voice sounds like at anything other than a 1x speed, but if you want Avalon Lost: Chipmunk Edition, then go ahead and crank that up. The audiobook is currently available via Audible, and you can listen to the first five minutes of Chapter 1 through that link. You can ALSO listen to the entirety of Chapter 6 on Mary Rose’s Substack (It’s a quick action scene, so it doesn’t spoil much of anything).

I would be remiss to forget that the second book in the series is also on its way very soon. There are no plans for an audio release for book 2 at this time, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be ready until at least the middle of 2027! I’ve got some big projects ahead, but rest assured you’ll hear about it first.