Good job Max Grant with the Worldwrights and I will be waiting for many more great novels and novella’s from you.

Anthony Cascella

E.

The names issue with the story I can totally agree with. I wrote this story almost 18 years ago, so some aspects of it are very immature to me. I have written much since then. I re-worked a lot of aspects of the story as I brought it to “publication” but I completely rewrote the climax of the story at the 11th hour and was so pleased with how it came out I almost started completely over — it was very difficult to decide when to let go of it.

As for the episode spread — that’ll never happen again. I will not release any episodes of a podcast again until I am over 75% done with the entire recording. There were too many unexpected setbacks that slowed it down and I was painfully conscious that readers were dropping out left and right as they waited for me to get on with it. And the “recap” is a good suggestion too. Thanks so much for listening. There is more to come, I assure you.

Max it seems as though you are really trying to improve on your podcasting abilities so I’ll provide a little feedback there. Overall your narration has gotten a lot better and more entertaining. Technically I noticed that even in the latest chapters your voice sometimes echoes just a bit. The underlying soundtrack is quite good and definitely adds value and entertainment to the listening experience. It isn’t too loud, in fact I’d say most of the time it is just right.

Occasionally I found it hard to keep track of who is who and where they were in the story. I had trouble linking the names to the entity. I’d possibly simplify the names a bit, they can still have a mystical sound to them while being common. Part of my problem was that the episodes were often spread far apart from each other so I would forget exactly where I was in the book last chapter. In this case it might be good to have a fifteen or twenty second review at the beginning of each chapter.

Keep up the good work!

It took all my spare time this week to wrap these up, and boy is it nice to be finished. I didn’t take this long to *write* the book in the first place. Thanks to everyone who’s tuned in for your patience and support. I hope the finished product is to your liking. I tried to have some fun with the sound design this time around and I’ve learned some cool stuff. The next time I do a podcast I’m likely to set aside an entire year to work it up and do a whole soundscape for it. The few moments where I have put in effects have been very rewarding.

My compliments on another of your many life achievements. You are quite the star! -Alan

15 is the longest chapter I’ve done since 8 — almost an hour. Editing was a major undertaking. The next 3 chapters put together won’t be quite as long as 15, and those are the last, so hopefully I will be done here soon. I have learned a lot from this process and I’m eager to do another book with my lessons learned.

Henk, I do hope your opinion was formed sometime in the first five chapters — I can give you that. I re-listened to some of them earlier and I thought I was reading in a “golf whisper.” I hope that your opinion of the later chapters improves. I have tried to make use of my voice range a little more (I can actually be very loud if I want to, and I often pull back to avoid crashing my meters when I read). Anyway, point taken and I’m learning. There are more books after this one. I already have all kinds of ideas about how I’m going to podcast them.

That said, your narration needs work. Hoping that my criticism does not sound overly negative, you sound like you are reading a list. You often sound bored when you read.

If anyone has any comments about my production values on this please don’t hesitate to drop me a line, either here, on my website, or on my blog: http://maxgrant.blogspot.com. I’m especially interested in people’s opinion of the soundtrack and its volume. I am basically doing atmospheric chords adlib throughout the track. I keep it low so you can tune it out if you don’t want to hear it very much. Occasionally I’ll mix up this or that bit; sometimes I’m quoting actual completed compositions that I’ve dredged up from the past. Anyway, I hope that the quality of the narration has noticably improved throughout the recording: I feel I’ve learned a lot doing this and grown as a narrator.

I am absolutely jazzed about this. Chapter 9 will be up this weekend, and that’s half of the book. I have not recorded chapters 10-18 yet, but damn I’ll get started right away.