Exciting news!

 As I'm sure I've stated before (or maybe I haven't), I have a tentative date for the release of my debut novel, A Sinister Love. 

April 8th! The solar eclipse!

I can't wait. It is exciting and daunting and nerve-wracking all at once. It may not be with a big publisher, but this is still a lifelong dream come true! 

But we're also going to do a Kickstarter for it! We have some pretty good ideas for what to offer you all, but it is going to mean a lot of hard work in a short period of time.

It doesn't help that this is the first time I'll have been on the other side of a Kickstarter campaign.

Here's a list of the things I need to do for it... or at least some of the things.

1- Get a video
    My brother will take care of this, but I need to get him all the information, a breakdown/script of what will be in it. I also need to get interviews in for the video, as well as sounds effects, voice actor(s), etc. I will need to do some research.

2- Make an outline of the campaign page
    I've dealt with plenty of Kickstarter campaigns as a host of the Board Game Rundown. We used to do a segment on what was new to crowdfunding, plus I've made connections with people who have run their own campaigns, both successfully and unsuccessfully. But this is the first time I'll be on the other side of the page. I'm looking at similar projects now to get an idea of what they do.

3- Images
    Part of getting the outline of the page done is figuring out every single image in it so I can assign these to my sister or others to put together for me. This not only means a mock rendering of the novel in its various forms, but of all the merchandise as well. Plus there are headers, stretch goals, and other miscellaneous images that must be made.

4 - Tiers
    Seems obvious, but it's not. Every KS has different levels of rewards you can earn for donating so much money. Offering too few can hurt sales, but so can offering too many. So, my current thought is:

• get on the mailing list
• get the e-book and some bit of merch
• get the audiobook and some bit of merch
• get a signed paperback
• get a signed hardcover
  
• book club tier

I also want to offer a really awesome opportunity for 1 or 2 backers willing to pay. But I'm not going to say what it is. 😜

4- Merchandise!
    As a wise culture once said, "Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the *real* money from the movie is made." Well I don't know about that, but it certainly isn't going to hurt. Plus there are a lot of things I can offer. At the moment, I'm toying with a few ideas but I need to narrow and pin them down. I also realized that one of my characters, Surli (a snarky digital assistant), is perfect for merchandising. Options include: Surli pins, Surli bookmarks, Surli stickers, Surli thumb drives, postcards, coasters, signed digital copies of the cover art, soul stone jewelry, heck even a Surli plush (squeeze it and it insults you!). 

5- Stretch goals
    Most crowdfunding campaigns do better if there are good stretch goals that are achievable. I've come up with a few that I am proud of. First, I have already asked my artist and she is more than willing to produce new art, so one or two of the stretch goals will be to break open new art prints as an add-on. She already did a second piece of art for the book, so one stretch goal might be to offer the choice between two different covers. Not only is more art going to be available, but with enough backers, I will offer non-digital prints of the signed art, even a metal print! Finally, with enough backers, everyone will get a free short story (or two) telling them more about the characters (I already have several in mind that I would love to write). 

6- Shipping and other logistics
    Boring stuff, but super important. I've got to figure out how to ship everything. I'm just one guy, so if this operation goes viral, I'll need to have a plan for how to tackle that. I need to be able to estimate shipping costs to the various parts of the world (if I can find an overseas press, that might help with a lot of it, but they'd likely still have to mail me book covers I can sign and then mail back to them). There are a lot of logistics to consider, include pricing, what pledge manager to use, timing, monetary goal for the campaign, etc.

7- Risks
    Everything carries risks, even if you don't see them at first. I learned from some good friends who have also sold books via Kickstarter that some risks just can't be anticipated. No one could have guessed that a worldwide pandemic would cause the price of both shipping and PAPER to skyrocket, for instance. Now, there are ways to mitigate some of this (for instance, not including the cost of shipping in the campaign, just an estimate, and having the shipping cost be applied during the pledge manager part to eliminate some of the time between estimated shipping and actual shipping). I can only cross my fingers that something doesn't happen that will kill the campaign.

8- Transparency
    I'm bad about updated as frequently as I should, but that would have to change the moment the KS campaign opens. The site would need to be transparent and truthful about timing, costs, shipping, etc. and I would need to keep the backers in the loop regularly.

9- LLC
    I'm not a businessman and I've never taken business classes. But it was brought to my attention that if I start offering a host of merchandise to go along with the book, it might behoove me to start my own business...

There's more, there's always more... and I'm already thinking towards the future.

We are kicking around the idea of having a second Kickstarter later (or just part of the KS for the next book). Having a full-cast audiobook would be awesome. I would love to offer a leather-bound, gilt hardcover with ribbon bookmark and illustrations throughout. Plus, I might be able to figure out some way to make an actual Surli, either an AI or some sort of Siri/Alexa modification. For a later KS campaign, where I have more than a month to pull it all together (and hopefully a bit of a following by then), I would have a second group of Stretch Goals—Social Goals! I've seen this used to great effect in the past. It would be some awesome stretch goal that is only unlocked when enough people fulfill a list of social requirements, spreading the word on social media while tagging someone (and maybe mentioning something related to the book), taking a picture of yourself with either devil horns or a halo and posting it online, etc. I even saw one campaign that included a bunch of puzzles to solve and those who solved them all got a free add-on (less "social" and more "get them excited").
Or, there's always the possibility of... a crossover with another IP...

So there you have it. For the next month I am going to be hella busy. I can't wait, to be honest, but it's still a bit intimidating.

Wish me and A Sinister Love luck! If you have an idea of some piece of merch you would like to see, post it in the comments below.

Satisfying Sounds in Audacity

I've been working rather hard on this audiobook.

Part of the problem is that I apparently make a lot of "mouth sounds." But I am also running into things like a purring cat, strange vibrations, and mispronunciations.

Now, mouth sounds are supposed to be easy to fix. My mouth sounds are not. I get the normal clicks that a "declicker" can catch, sure, but it doesn't get them all. I also get wet smacking sounds and guttural sounds that aren't so easy to fix. 

Yet, I keep learning more about Audacity and either discovering or inventing new tricks to deal with them. Only a few have been able to get through.

A caveat: I am NOT an expert. I watched some of the experts. I am unwilling to spend an hour on less than 5 minutes of audio.

Here are some of the things I do.

Most of the mouth sounds are not actually during words. They're between words, right before or after a word. So if i copy a section of room silence (just record the empty room—you need this at the start and end of files anyway) and then paste it in place of the section between words (no matter HOW small), you'll take care of 90% of the sounds.

There's actually an easier trick I figured out on my own. There's something called a "low-pass filter." All this means is it turns the volume down (or off) on anything above a certain hertz (i.e. higher "notes") and lets the lower ones pass through. If I put the filter on to catch anything about, say, 150 Hz, and I use that only on the parts where I'm not speaking, it neatly eliminates almost every unwanted sound. What makes this easier is that I can then type ctrl-r and repeat it. No deleting for length is needed and if the room sound changes a little, it sounds much more natural.

But sometimes a sound is RIGHT where I'm talking. Chances are, if I do the trick above to either side of the word, my voice drowns out the rest and you can't hear it. And if it's short enough, and I zoom in far enough (and use "z" so it doesn't make artifacts), just deleting that section can usually remove the sound without really affecting my voice. But there are other things to do.

Audacity's "spectral" tools are neat and can be useful, or they can be useless. By right-clicking on the y-axis, I can change the view to "spectrum." This shows where the sounds are in hertz. Then I select the offending part and work up and down the word using "spectral delete" to figure out just WHERE that little bugger is hiding (if it isn't obvious). Once I find it, I undo everything and then use "spectral multi tool" on it. That often hides the sound without disturbing my voice too much. But this only works maybe 30% of the time. For instance, in the case of my purring cat, her purr is at the same hertz as the bulk of my voice, so anything I do to her purr affects my voice as well.

This is where I look for the "noise gate." The noise gate works kinda like the low- or high-pass filter, except instead of blocking a range of notes, it blocks a range of volume. Since her purr is a lot quieter than my voice, I play around with the settings until it blocks out her but doesn't affect me. Voila!

What if i can't find the sound on the spectrum and a filter would kill too much of the sound? Equalizer! Audacity has a variety of them. the graphic equalizer lets you turn up and down different frequency ranges. They say most unwanted sounds are in the 8k+ range, but a lot of mine are close to 3 or 4. Turning down a band or two for a short section usually doesn't affect my voice enough to be noticed by someone just listening to the book, and if it doesn't outright kill the sound, it can turn it down enough that it gets ignored. "Preview" is really good for this. I use it all the time.

If there's a short sound (like a click) that the declicker didn't get, but it's during part of a word where I simply can't mess around with my voice at all (like a "d"), or if I want to do things "the right way," I can use "repair." Right-click on the y-axis and change the view from amp to dB. Then zoom zoom zoom in. Find the offending section. Select just it or part of it (the tool can only fix really small areas) and use repair until it's all gone. When it works, it is freaking awesome. But so far, it is very hit or miss.

If you're having trouble finding just WHERE a sound is, I have a way. When you push play, the end of a selected section is often left off, but the beginning is always precise. So place the cursor before the sound and push play until you hear it. Then pause. Move the cursor further down and try it again. Keep doing that until you hit a section where you don't hear the sound and you know it is just before that part. Granted, there's often a clicky sound when you push play in the middle of the word, so you have to learn to tune that out.

Of course, there's another awesome way to get rid of an errant sound. I was having trouble with a strange vibration that went throughout an "s." It was a broad enough spectrum that if I removed it using the spectrum tools, my voice would sound like I was in a tin can. It was the same volume as my voice. It wasn't small, so repair wouldn't work. I was at a loss! So... I found another place where I used an "s" and copied it, then pasted that over the offending "s." Lo and behold, I couldn't tell I'd done anything and the vibration was gone. I've been able to use that trick for many letters and even entire words, but I have to be careful because the tone and volume of my voice might change between the original and the new sections. I ALWAYS play it back to make sure it sounds smooth.

What if I realize I left off a bit of a word (like a "d" or "s")? Copy paste from another! But that doesn't work for everything. Sometimes, I slur my words together. I rush. Rushing is bad. "Hehad toooze" instead of "He had to ooze" (don't judge me, it's an example) sounds awful. I have a couple options.

The first is to take some (TINY bit) of the room noise and paste it between the words. However, that will sound terrible. So I use "fade out" and "fade in" on the ends of the two words. Often, that is enough to make it sound like a natural flow. 

The second is a bit harder but sounds even better. Find where the two words should separate. Then make a divot between them. Turning down the volume a little and in increments can work but is time consuming and doesn't sound the best. There's a way to do it with one of the fade tools, but I haven't figured it all out yet (I believe it uses "adjustable fade"). But there's a cheat. I add room noise between the two words, then I fade either end like before. But instead of leaving some of the room noise there, I actually select the very tips of the two sections and delete them WITH the room noise. I gotta use "z" and I need to make sure both parts are at the same volume level (zoom in a lot), but what I end up with is a smooth divot between the words. It's enough that you'll easily differentiate the two words while listening to the book.

Hopefully this will help someone who is in a similar situation.

Sus Sounds

 As you may be aware, I have been recording the audiobook of A Sinister Love and I’ve been learning a lot of things about audio editing and recording, especially about Audacity, which is the free software I’m using.

But there have been a few kinda creepy things that happened. 

I use a Scarlet interface between my mic (which uses phantom power) and my computer. Now I was having trouble connecting my headphones to it (I needed.a 3.5 adapter). The day I got the adapter I needed, I was watching a clip from The Tonight Show on my iPad (which I use to read the book while I’m recording) while doing some chores first. Then I tried to hook up my headphones to the Scarlet, but I couldn’t figure out how to get sound. I still haven’t figured it out. But to appreciate what happened, I need to give my setup.

I use a Scarlet connected via USB to my Windows laptop. My headphones are connected via bluetooth to the laptop most of the time, but this time I had them connected to the Scarlet. The iPad is not part of this setup at all.

So I plugged the headphones in and couldn’t hear anything. I turned the volume up all the way… and suddenly I could hear, faintly and muffled, the clip from the Tonight Show that I’d been watching. I checked the iPad… it was no longer on that video or playing anything. My phone wasn’t playing anything. My computer didn’t even have that website open. If I plugged it into the computer, nothing. But I plugged it back into the Scarlet and I could hear it again.

It was a little freaky, but mostly a mystery.

However, after I had finished recording, I had to sit down and listen intently to every track to get rid of extraneous sounds and make it all sound good. I turned it up LOUD for this. There are a lot of mouth sounds to get rid of. I heard a conversation in the background of one of the tracks, but I’m always alone in the house when I record. I chalked it up to someone talking outside.

But late last night, as I was listening in where I heard some mouth sounds, I noticed a strange hum. I turned it up all the way.

It was a girl humming a song. She sounded young, 8 or less. There weren’t any words. But it was so quiet, it couldn’t have been from outside, not to mention there are no little girls on our street. It stopped a couple seconds after I noticed it (my voice would have masked any more of it before then), but I went back and listened three times.

I should have saved that bit of audio. I deleted it because that part of the recording was extraneous… and also because it freaked me the hell out.

It’s enough to make a guy believe in ghosts.

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol review

 Last year, Netflix released an animated remake of a 1970 film called Scrooge: A Christmas Carol. It has not received very high ratings, but I am going to give my unpopular opinion right now and say it is actually SUPERIOR to the original story by Dickens.

Scandal! How dare he say that!

Let's start with the fact that A Christmas Carol was written in the 1840s and that Dickens is extremely overrated. If you read the story, it lacks punch or bite, at least compared to today's tales. the foreshadowing of Scrooge's death was meant to evoke mystery or fear, when all it does is scream, "IT'S EBENEZER! HE SNUFFED IT!"

The Netflix version keeps up a modern pacing. It's a musical (and the music has grown on me quite a bit). It removes some scenes and combines things to make the story more efficient without losing any of the meaning. The acting in it is actually very good (I was flabbergasted to see that Jacob Marley was played by Jonathan Price!). Of course everyone knows what happens, but the interesting thing is watching Scrooge change.

His change starts when he sees Belle again. Dickens doesn't even mention Belle until she is leaving him. There was no build-up, no foreshadowing, nothing. Her leaving him is tantamount to introducing a character just to kill them in the same scene and hope the audience gets a reaction out of it. The new version, however, shows him lighting up when he sees her face. It shows him as a young man with virtue, someone worthy of being loved. There's a song about how deeply in love the two of them were. throughout the movie, we see his pocketwatch, and here we learn it was a gift from her. Adding this all makes the next scene SO much more poignant.
In the original tale, Belle "releases him" of their engagement because he has changed; in his desire to prevent the vagaries of life from ruining him, he turned all his focus on greed. She hopes he feels some pain in this but knows it will be brief. Then Scrooge cries out for it to stop. But we don't really get any sense of what was going on as he watched the scene, there's no explanation as to WHY he wanted the scene to stop—was he tortured over losing her, over what he became, over how she saw him? Indeed, the last would have more merit than the others because the next scene we see Belle with a husband and kids being told how lonely Scrooge became and Scrooge does not like how they see him.  We will get back to this bit later.
In the animated version, he *very* clearly regrets his actions. Scrooge attempted to distract the Spirit of Christmas Past (who is a fabulous character, by the way) because he didn't want her to bring him to that moment. BUT we also see how Jacob Marley was corrupting him. He was the reason Cratchit's family is poor (putting Bob Cratchit's father into debtor's prison)—another detail I adore—and in the same scene he discovers that Belle witnessed the entire thing. Now we can SEE he changed and how much it affected her. During the breakup song (possibly my favorite in the soundtrack), time freezes and he gets a moment without the Spirit to express how he *truly* felt, and begs his younger self to go with her. You can see that he had fallen in love with her all over again.

But more than that, we see WHY he hated Christmas so much. He had to work on Christmas (or study in the book), but in this version, his beloved sister also died in childbirth on Christmas (which resulted him despising his nephew whom he blames), he fell in love with Isabelle around Christmas, she broke up with him on Christmas... After we see just how much he wants his younger self to go with her, it's easy to believe the breakup hurt him deeply but he had to hide it all, harden himself.

Do you see yet why I prefer this newer version? Well, there's one more really major reason I've hinted at, but we'll get there.

Next is Christmas Present. Now, I will give the devil his due. I love how his own words are thrown back at him in the original tale when he shows concern for Tiny Tim, and I like the 2 children, Ignorance and Want (even though they were entirely unnecessary). Likewise, a great deal of time was spent showing that Scrooge would actually enjoy company and loved playing games, even when he wasn't seen nor heard.
But in the original tale, he is mostly distraught over what they all think of him. His nephew isn't quite as kind as he might be. This is in sharp contrast to the new version, where his nephew reminds him that he, too, loved Scrooge's sister, even though he didn't get to know her, that they were family, and that somewhere inside was the good person his mother adored. It's a much kinder Fred, but also shifts the focus from Scrooge to their relationship.
When we see the Cratchits, Scrooge shows concern over Tiny Tim. In the book, Tiny Tim is seen as frail, support by a crutch and "iron frame." Apparently that was enough for Scrooge to suddenly be worried about the child's welfare. In the movie, Tiny Tim is small and has a crutch, but also has coughing fits—the same ones his sister had but which she recovered from once their father paid for medicine. Again, in the original story we see little of Scrooge's reactions to what is going on when compared to pretty much ANY modern retelling. In this version, Tiny Tim busks for money with his sister and is a lovely singer, making Tiny Tim more than just "crutch-boy." And Scrooge turns away with tears in his eyes as he realizes HE could actually be helping the child, that Bob wasn't just giving him a line when he said his son needed medicine.

Finally, we come to Christmas Future and the biggest reason I think this version is superior to any other I've ever seen (sorry Muppets).
In the original story, Scrooge there are a bunch of scenes that are either completely useless or basically get summed up into one scene in the movie (along with a catchy tune, "Thank you very much."). Here I would like to point something out.
Dickens throws so much foreshadowing that Scrooge had to have been an absolute idiot if he didn't realize that he was the one who had died. That is a character flaw of Scrooge, likely willful disbelief. But what we get in the movie is called dramatic irony. That is when the audience knows something important that the characters don't know. Scrooge had NO WAY of knowing that the reason everyone was praising his name was because he had died, but the audience gets to see one of the characters literally dancing on his coffin. Scrooge is put in a GOOD mood.
The end, though, is the most important bit. The movie takes two scenes and combines them—learning of Tiny Tim's death and seeing his own grave. In the book, Scrooge has 0 reaction to learning of Tiny Tim's death. Seriously, after the little spark of worry he had earlier, he doesn't say a word about it. Instead he is more preoccupied with who the dead man was. He is led to his own grave where he immediately and rather anticlimactically embraces Christmas and Goodness and all that jazz. 
In the movie, he follows the group of cheering townsfolk to the graveyard, but sees Bob Cratchit at Tiny Tim's grave. This makes him distraught more than anything else. This is where he asks if this is the vision of things that will come or things that may. He has pretty much made up his mind at that point to be a good person, because he knows he can actually *help* others. Then he is led to his grave (which also has a lovely scene of him seeing his own spirit in the same fashion as Jacob Marley's... and the gold coins on the eyes, such a delicious touch). But even AFTER seeing this, he says, "If I am doomed, so be it, but at least give me a chance to help the boy first!"

Did you see that? Let me spell it out. In Dicken's version, Scrooge was selfish and remained so. The entire reason he repented was over how people saw him. A- He didn't like how Belle's husband described him as lonely and wretched. B- He didn't like people stealing his stuff after he died. C- He didn't like that people were happy he was dead. D- He didn't like how his nephew and their friends talked about him.

For years I wondered if I was the only one who saw this. In all the other versions, it's the same. He wants to wipe his own name from the grave. But in this version? A- He accepts his death but pleads for a chance to help Tiny Tim. Tiny Tim's death—from a condition he saw his sister recover from—was the real impetus he had in changing his ways. B- He wants a chance to show his nephew Fred that person his sister had loved, to accept him as part of the family finally. C- When he looks down at his watch, he says, "I'm happy Isabelle found her happiness. I only hope I'm not too late to find my own." It shows he's moving on and finally letting go, that he's returning to the person she had fallen for in the first place.
It ties together all the people he started helping in a better way. I hope you agree with me that this is just superior. Scrooge: A Christmas Carol has pretty much ruined all other iterations of the story for me.