Creative Audiobook Productions

Quatermain: The New Adventures, Volume 1

Quatermain: The New Adventures is a New Pulp adventure fiction series that adds to the legendary stories of H. Rider Haggard's iconic character Allan Quatermain. Set in the jungles, mountains, and savannas of Africa in the late 1800s, these tales capture the air of danger, mystery, and myth that Europeans expected and experienced in their colonization of "The Dark Continent." In addition to the 17 original Haggard novels, there have been both direct and indirect movie adaptations, most notably King Solomon's Mines, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Indiana Jones series. The only character common to both of the stories in the first volume of Quatermain: The New Adventures is Allan Quatermain himself. He's described as being an Englishman in his mid-50s, with gray hair and beard, and short but strong. Most of the time he's calm, slow-paced, and reflective; but once the situation turns dangerous, Quatermain turns into a quick-thinking, precise-acting, calculated hunter. This wasn't an easy voice to develop, but from the beginning the only model I had in mind for it was Alec Guinness. The first story, "Golden Ivory," is a first-person account of a riverboat pilot's journey with Quatermain and his party into the African... Read more →

Sinbad: The New Voyages, Volume 3: The Warriors of Forever

Sinbad: The New Voyages is an print and audio series of short stories and novellas based on the Arabian legend of Sinbad the Sailor. The exact origins of the stories of Sinbad's voyages is unclear, but Sinbad eventually made it into the 1001 Arabian Nights canon. Most people know Sinbad from the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation effects films of the mid-20th century, the animated shows, and the various other modern retellings. This series of audiobooks is both a tribute to and extension of Harryhausen's style of adventure storytelling. All of the Sinbad: The New Voyages stories honor Airship 27 publisher Ron Fortier's vision of a multi-cultural crew of warriors and mystics accompanying Sinbad on his voyages. Unlike previous and subsequent volumes, Sinbad: The New Voyages Volume 3 consists of one full-length novel instead of a trio of short stories and novellas, enabling the story to play out over a longer period of time. Here’s my writeup on the first volume in the series, which also explains how I developed the voices for all of the main characters that span all volumes, and here's my writeup for Volume 2. The story in Volume 3, subtitled "The Warriors of Forever," fits the... Read more →

Sinbad: The New Voyages, Volume 2

Sinbad: The New Voyages is a series of collections of short stories and novellas based on the Arabian legend of Sinbad the Sailor. The exact origins of the stories of Sinbad's voyages is unclear, but Sinbad eventually made it into the 1001 Arabian Nights canon. Most people know Sinbad from the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation effects films of the mid-20th century, the animated shows, and the various other modern retellings. Sinbad: The New Voyages Volume 2 contains one novella and two short stories based on Harryhausen’s vision for Sinbad and his crew of warriors and mystics. Here’s my writeup on the first volume in the series, which also explains how I developed the voices for all of the main characters that span all volumes. For Volume 2, I developed one major new vocal effect: The Lich King. Obviously based on the famous villain from the later Warcraft games, it’s the most complex and nuanced effect I’ve yet created. It uses several tracks with varying pitch changes and echo/reverb configurations. Here’s a sample of the effect that I created while I was testing it, using dialogue from the World of Warcraft “Wrathgate” scene: In the audiobook, I used this effect for... Read more →

Sinbad: The New Voyages, Volume 1

Sinbad: The New Voyages is a series of collections of short stories and novellas based on the ancient legend of Sinbad the Sailor. The exact origins of the stories of Sinbad's voyages is unclear, but Sinbad eventually made it into the 1001 Arabian Nights canon. Most people know Sinbad from the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation effects films of the mid-20th century, and some of the more modern remakes and reboots. Sinbad: The New Voyages Volume 1 contains three new original stories based on Sinbad and his crew of warriors and mystics. These stories are marvelously suited to a dramatic audiobook reading. I really put the pedal to the floor on this one, and I'm already working on producing the next three volumes. The basic plot of all Sinbad stories (even the original ones) is this: Sinbad is either in need of more money or is given a quest from the Sultan to retrieve something mythologically significant. He gets his core crew together (described below) and takes on oarsmen and sailors to work his ship. Along the way, supernatural creatures attack, and Sinbad and his crew fight spectacular battles to survive and keep on sailing. There is often an arch-rival villain... Read more →

Deathwish World, by Mack Reynolds and Dean Ing

Deathwish World is a near-future science fiction story written in the 1980s by two prolific speculative fiction authors. It centers around four characters whose paths unexpectedly converge in their quest for personal and social justice: Horace Hampton, a 30ish black American man who volunteers as an agent of the Anti-Racist League; Roy Cos, a political activist who tries to recruit the few privileged workers in America to join together in an all-encompassing labor union; Lee Garrett, a stunningly attractive and independently wealthy American woman who endures a lengthy application process in order to join the ranks of the futuristic Illuminati-like group known as The World Club; and Franklin Pinell, a 20ish American man who is deported upon being convicted of his third felony, and seeks to join the ranks of an international megacorporation that provides murder-for-hire services to the rich and powerful. The main character, if there can be said to be one, is Horace Hampton. Without revealing too much of the plot, I'll say that he has an alter ego named Jeremiah Auburn. While Hampton is a black proletariat on welfare, Auburn is white, exceptionally rich, and holds a position of power in The World Club. In order to... Read more →

The Not-World, by Thomas Burnett Swann

The Not-World is a non-Tolkien fantasy novel with elements of historical fiction and classical mythology. Set in mid 18th-century England, it chronicles the shared adventures of three extrordinary characters: Deirdre, a romance novelist who suffers from chronic pain and disability due to a childhood accident; Dylan, a discharged Royal Navy seaman who has taken a second career as a carriage driver; and Thomas Chatterton, a real-life 18th-century poet who, after his suicide as a teenager, is largely credited with inspiring the Romantic Period. Deirdre hires Dylan to drive her from London to Bristol, where she will stay with her aunt while London suffers from an outbreak of the plague. Along the way, they are supernaturally drawn into the forest beside the road between Bath and Bristol, known from local folklore as "The Not-World," a realm inhabited by dangerous creatures from ancient Celtic and Roman mythology. With the help of the teenage poet Thomas Chatterton, who enjoys visiting the woods, they escape back to the road and get a new ride to Bristol. But the connection between the sea-worn Dylan and adventure-starved Deirdre is too much for either to go without. So when Thomas sends Deirdre a letter begging her to... Read more →

The Hero, by Anonymous

I worked on the audio edition of The Hero for more than 4 months, as a dedicated effort and as a part-time effort when other projects were in progress. It's the longest project I've ever done, and it's also the most challenging; I had to do more than 40 different character voices. Though it's credited to Anonymous, I wrote it. No secret or mystery behind it -- just a desire to make the book more powerful for readers. It's in first-person past tense, and the main character has no name, gender, or race, so I didn't want new readers to wonder who the main character was and flip back to the cover to see what the name on the front was, and then associate the two. When I created the audio book cover, I found a clever way to represent this: The Hero is set in a pre-gunpowder, post-feudal civilization with an emotional atmosphere similar to the Kurosawa and Leone films of the 1960s and 70s. The main character -- known only as The Captain -- devastated by the death of his mentor, travels to a remote village to notify his next-of-kin. The journey to the village follows a path... Read more →