Only six cassette tapes left after today’s project, which was “More of the Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy,” from Dove Audio. Four cassettes, six hours, nine stories.<\/p>\n
I’d never listened to some of these. I’d played my own story, of course, and one or two others sounded familiar, but that’s it.<\/p>\n
Mostly good stories read well, but I think it was a mistake to not tell the reader of “Permafrost” how to pronounce “Zelazny.” I’d never heard it garbled quite that way before.<\/p>\n
I also wouldn’t have picked “Permafrost” as the best available Zelazny story, but maybe that’s just me. (I’d have maybe gone for “Devil Car,” or “Home is the Hangman.”)<\/p>\n
And while “The Poplar Street Study” is interesting, I wouldn’t have chosen it, because the ending (as much as it has one) is so weak.<\/p>\n
There were odd little glitches here and there, such as a reader who mispronounced “nascent,” and a few seconds of dead air in the middle of “Permafrost,” but mostly it was good.<\/p>\n
This was the anthology where Wil Wheaton read “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” and he did a fine job, except that he gave Joe a Brooklyn accent, probably because of the way I wrote his dialogue, but he’s supposed to be from Pittsburgh, so Brooklyn sounded a bit odd to me.<\/p>\n
Nana Visitor did a very nice job with Kris Rusch’s “Skin Deep,” too. None of the other readers really stood out for me.<\/p>\n
Anyway. That’s done. That leaves one anthology, one convention panel, and my father’s memorial service on cassette.<\/p>\n
And then there are the four VHS tapes I turned up. I’ve recorded one of those, which turned out to be longer than I expected, so we now have two hours and twenty minutes of video of the kids, covering 1984 to 1990, on DVD. But it’s not finalized and I’ve only chapter-stopped about the first fifteen minutes.<\/p>\n
One of the other three may be a copy of it, I’m not sure. Then there’s my sister’s memorial service, and I don’t know what the last one is. We’ll find out.<\/p>\n
Got the reel-to-reel tape recorder out of storage, but I haven’t hooked it up yet. Don’t know if it still works.<\/p>\n
And a sidelight: Remember the guy who sent me those “Various Artists” tapes back in ’92? Well, we’re still in touch, and in today’s mail I got, without any warning, a couple of CDs of female singers he thought I might like. He was right about one of them: Hayley Reardon. Lauren Frost isn’t bad, but doesn’t quite push the right buttons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Only six cassette tapes left after today’s project, which was “More of the Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy,” from Dove Audio. Four cassettes, six hours, nine stories. I’d never listened to some of these. I’d played my own story, of course, and one or two others sounded familiar, but that’s it. Mostly good stories… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants","category-strange-days"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":857,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}