Narrator, audiobook producer, podcaster, writer, editor/producer for the JimFear138 YouTube Account, editor/co-producer for Laughably Dapper, and Project lead for Dramatically Dapper, co-founder of Dimension Bucket Magazine, and host of the Dimension Bucket Magazine Podcast. This site is meant to be a collection of my work so everything is nice and accessible.
Disclaimer: Opinions here do not represent the opinions of Laughably Dapper or Dimension Bucket Magazine. They are purely my own.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast! This week I talk with Brian Niemeier about his new Combat Frame X-Seed project one on one! Be sure to visit the indiegogo link below and throw your support behind this one, because if we get it up to $5,000 I get to do the audiobook for it! You can find a sample on Brian's blog here! This is just a taste, so if you want to hear the rest of the book, be sure to donate, and get your friends and family to as well! As for the lack of a sponsor roll in this episode, I've had a medical emergency over the past weekend. During the course, I bit my tongue so hard it's swollen to over twice its normal size, which prevents me from recording anything until the swelling goes down. So just this once we'll have to deal with no sponsors. I'm hoping to be back to normal next week, but we'll see. These pain meds are fairly strong, but I'm making progress, just not as fast as I'd like to be. Anyway, hope y'all enjoy! MP3 download of this episode: https://ia600408.us.archive.org/25/items/jimfear_audio_productions/Ep97.mp3 Relevant links: Combat Frame X-Seed Indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/combat-frame-xseed-novel#/
Before I get into this I'd like to say that I mean no disrespect to the narrator of this series of audiobooks. Eric Vincent is a fine narrator, he was just not right for this project. Much like Ryan Reynolds as The Green Lantern, he is a competent performer put in the wrong role. He wouldn't even be out of his depth in pulp stories, as his voice and manner of speech would be well suited to almost any of Lovecraft's protagonists. But in listening to A Princess of Mars over the course of several days, just having finished it today, it became apparent that this audiobook is damn near an insult to the legacy of Mr. Burroughs, as well as the character of John Carter.
That being said, I bought this while at my last job because it has, as advertised, 7 of the John Carter books, coming to over 54 hours of audio. I believe I got it with one of my Audible credits, so 54 hours of John Carter for about $15 USD is a pretty damn good deal. Or, so I had thought.
The problems with this audio are numerous, and few of them are the fault of the narrator, to get that out of the way. As I said, somebody picked him, and they picked wrong. A Princess of Mars, at least, is told in a first person perspective by John Carter himself, not in third person or some other perspective. When I heard what John Carter was like, the last voice I expected him to have was Eric Vincent's thin, higher pitched, almost quavery voice. From the wikipedia description:
Carter stands 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) and has close-cropped black hair and steel-grey eyes. Burroughs describes him as immortal. In the opening pages of A Princess of Mars, it is revealed that Carter can remember no childhood, having always been a man of about thirty years old. Many generations have known him as "Uncle Jack," but he always lived to see them grow old and die, while he remained young.
His character and courtesy exemplify the ideals of the antebellumSouth. A Virginian, he served as a captain in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. After the war, Carter and his companion Powell, who was also a captain in the Civil War, became gold prospectors. Carter and Powell struck it rich by finding gold in Arizona. While hiding from Apaches in a cave, he appears to die; leaving his inanimate body behind, he is mysteriously transported by a form of astral projection to the planet Mars, where he finds himself re-embodied in a form identical to his earthly one. Accustomed to the greater gravity of Earth, he finds himself to be much stronger and more agile than the natives of Mars.
Now does that sound like the man you hear speaking in the audio sample on Audible? It doesn't even sound close to me. Part of the problem is the simple timbre of Vincent's voice, another part of this problem is that he doesn't attempt much voice acting, except on the Green Martians, with which he has limited success. I'm one to talk, I'm not exactly Peter Kenny over here, but I have been doing this voice acting/narrating stories thing for a few years, and I can tell when someone's really trying and when they're phoning it in. Although, maybe I haven't listened to enough of Vincent's work to know his reading style. He certainly tried to give the prose some punch as he was reading, with dramatic pauses and a non-monotone delivery.
But this leads me to my next problem: The editing. I don't know who the editor on this was, but I hope that asshole got fired and is flipping burgers somewhere. Part of why my audiobooks sound so seamless is that I edit out as many breaths and mouth noises as possible except in the case of dialogue, because it's meant to sound like someone is talking rather than someone reading a sequence of events. Now I'm certain that Mr. Vincent made his mistakes throughout the book, we all do, but the editor being able to edit those out while completely ignoring the vast silences lasting seconds, the deep breaths, and the swallowing noises that were left in the final product that you have to pay money for is unconscionable, and this editor deserves to lose his job over this.
At least in my opinion. Maybe my editing is a bit more intensive than other people's. But this seems to me to be a hallmark of professionalism. I, as a consumer, don't want to listen to the narrator breathing, or swallowing, while I'm trying to hear the story. It's immersion breaking, and should be kept to an absolute bare minimum. It was not in this series, and that reflects badly on the editor, not Mr. Vincent, although it's easy to see why people would blame him for it. Like how a singer in a band will be blamed for the lyrical content even though the bassist is writing all the songs, or something of that nature.
And then there's my biggest issue.
Because this whole project is so large, they've broken it up into several parts to facilitate faster downloads. This is all fine and dandy. You have seven books, split it into seven parts. That way I can download each individual book one at a time, listen to them, then move on to the next. That's how you would normally expect this to go, right?
Well guess what these geniuses did.
They split the books at the most asinine of places!
Part 1 is most of A Princess of Mars. Part 2 is the very ass-end of Princess (the last five or six chapters or so), and then we kick into The Gods of Mars with nary a break in between except to announce the title of the second book. The worst part of this is that there is an audio track at the beginning of each part that tells you who the narrator is, the writer is, the names of the books, and the company that produced this unevenly crafted abomination and spittle on Burroughs's face. And this is put around the end of chapter 25, right after John & Dejah marry.
Which lead me to think the book was over and I was already ruminating on what an awesome literary experience I'd just had...
When the next part starts up and Princess continues!
This is bad decision-making and retardation on such a massive scale that I doubt I'll be buying any of this company's audiobooks in the future. If this is the kind of care and respect they show to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the grandfather of modern science fiction, I can't imagine they would care too much about anybody else's work.
If you're looking for a John Carter audiobook collection, for the love of all the Jedaks on Barsoom, avoid this one!
Unfortunately for myself I can't find my John Carter dead-tree collection, so I'm kind of stuck with it for now. But you don't have to be! Take care when you're purchasing an audiobook! Make sure the company actually has respect for what they're working on!
Hello everybody, and welcome to another ramblecast! This time I go longer, harder, and more rambley! I really didn't have a plan when I recorded this, but I soldiered on and managed to get 2+ hours out of it, and I hope you all enjoy my disjointed ramblings. I touch on my recent quitting of my job, my plans going forward, how busy I've been, political shit, a new twitter friend I made, and a whole bunch of other shit because god forbid that I actually keep track of what I'm talking about for once in my fucking life. This goes everywhere, and there's no overall point, so I hope y'all are still willing to put up with my pointless ramblings!
Okay guys, full disclosure. I have been contracted by Mr. Boyle to make the audiobook for this novel. He has sent me an advance for the audiobook, with the remainder to be sent upon completion of the audiobook. Just so we're all on the same page here.
The reason that I'm doing this is that Mr. Boyle is insanely kind and understanding, and I feel a debt of gratitude that I must repay, so I'm giving his book what platform I have in hopes to repay that debt. If you want to follow up on this and actually buy the book, you can click on the image above and it will take you to the amazon store page where you can get it. It's not expensive, and I would consider it a favor if you all helped out this person who has been so understanding of my personal situation, which I suppose I have to describe now.
So I've talked about this a little bit in the podcast, but it's been going on for much longer than that little snippet lets on. The reason I haven't brought this up before other than in a frustrated rant on the podcast is because I don't want people to think that I'm fishing for sympathy, which I'm not and don't fucking want in any capacity. Part of the reason that I took down the paypal donation button is that it felt really scummy to be taking donations for this kind of thing when I could just be providing a product that people want to buy, or advertising a product that people want to buy (you'll notice the blog has ads now), and let people contribute and support me that way. It also has a hefty amount to do with the fact that I've heard some horror stories about paypal's donations being only for non-profits, and them withholding funds from people who aren't registered as non-profits, so I just decided to cut that potential headache off at the source. But back to my health problems, which I'm loathe to talk about but it unfortunately must be done.
Essentially I was slowly going blind.
Now that sounds a lot worse than the actuality of the situation. The quick rundown is this: I let a sinus infection ride for like five months because I always get sick in wintertime and it didn't seem like that big of a deal. Then my vision starts going wonky. I wear glasses, so I figure that my prescription is going stale and go in to the optometrist. He finds out that I've got what are basically lesions in my eyeballs (yes, inside my eyeballs) and recommends me to a specialist. The specialist takes a look and figures that I need an eyeball injection (which isn't as bad as it sounds), and sets me up. I get the injection and we're seeing noticeable improvement in my eyesight, but at this point in the story (current right now) I've noticed the healing has kind of leveled off and my eyes aren't really improving anymore. Not getting worse, just not improving.
Okay. So to describe what I'm going through personally for a minute beyond the bastardized medical summation. One of these lesions in my eyeballs is in the exact center of my eyeball. The other one is off-center, so it doesn't screw with my vision all that much. But the one that is dead-center is fucking with my vision heavily. I've basically been living with a double-vision effect going on constantly. This, as you can imagine, makes in incredibly hard to read. Well, not exactly hard, but difficult. I keep losing my place, I keep re-reading lines that I've read before due to losing my place, and it's been very frustrating in general. It's interfered with my day job to an extent (not just missed days for doctor visits), and it's been messing with me a lot with regards to my audiobooks.
If I were to try to record something while this is going on, I would stumble over my words, I would repeat lines and have to start over, I would lose my place and have to start over, and on and on. Essentially I could go record something, but the actual narration of a given chapter would take 4 hours to correct for mistakes, editing would take twice that, and given that I'm a bit of a hot-head anyways my frustration with this would bleed into my voice work and lead to an inferior performance. And if someone's paying me, which Mr. Boyle has, the absolute last thing I want to do is deliver an inferior performance. So I've been holding off on audio work for the past, I dunno, almost two months now, because of this eye condition.
Moral of the story, don't let a sinus infection ride. Get some damn claratin or something and take the fuck care of it. Learn from my retardation, use me as an object lesson.
But this has been very frustrating, because the audio work is what I really want to do with my life. I want this to be my full time job, and having this albatross slung around my neck is absolutely killing me. Which brings me to Mr. Boyle.
Now, I have to say that I haven't read the book yet. As I say, reading is a bit difficult with this eye malady happening. So I can't wax poetic about the characters, or the setting, or the plot, or the writing in general, and I apologize for that, I truly do.
However, what I can say is this.
I was extremely unprofessional with Mr. Boyle. I let my embarrassment with this eye condition and not being able to work get the better of me. I let my insecurity, natural reclusiveness, and general absent-mindedness get the better of me, and I did not contact him about this when it happened.To the point where he had to find out about this when I ranted about it in my podcast, which he listens to and I am very glad that there are actually people that listen to the podcast.
But this was extremely unprofessional of me. It was cowardly, it was base, it was low of me. I will endeavor to master myself more thoroughly so that this NEVER happens again, and rest assured that I have been flogging myself for letting this ride for so long without getting in contact with my employer. I have recognized my failing, and will correct it in the future. This will not become a habit, I will be sure of that. I was weak, and my weakness reflects badly on me, which I accept. I let my weakness affect my professionalism, and that is unacceptable and I will not forgive myself for it. I will use this as an object lesson in professionalism, learn from it, and be better in the future. I can only hope for the understanding of future clients as I work to extricate this particular weakness from my psyche and become a better person in the future.
But Mr. Boyle's reaction to all this was what spurred me to write this post, and I usually advocate for buying fiction based on the quality of said fiction, but in this instance I owe the man and if I can drive a couple of sales his way then I will repay a portion of the debt I owe.
As I said, he heard about this on the podcast, and afterwards reached out to me to let me know that...
Everything was okay.
I won't reveal the private email conversations that we had, but I will say this. He let me know that my health was the primary thing, and that I shouldn't strain my medical condition to get the audiobook out. He was extremely kind and understanding about the entire thing. He didn't demand his money back, he didn't call me names which I richly deserved to be called, he was almost Christ-like in his understanding. He is a good man, and in my opinion by that virtue alone he deserves more readers and followers, and that is why I'm promoting his book (at this point) sight unseen. I have bought it (I figure that if someone's paying me at my rate, which is cheap compared to most audiobook producers but still, then the least I can do is buy the book I'm going to be reading), but as I said I have not actually read it yet. But based on the way Mr. Boyle has treated me over the past couple of weeks I feel more than comfortable recommending his book to people. I'm going to be doing it anyway after the audiobook is published, so this is just jumping the gun a little bit and I don't think there will be any ill effects from it.
And if there are, then so be it. I do my best to pay my debts, and damn the torpedoes. Mr. Boyle was kind to me, and I owe him. This is part of my effort to pay back that debt. And I am incredibly, insanely, indescribably grateful to Mr. Boyle for the patience he has shown me. You do for me, I do my damndest to do for you. And Mr. Boyle has done for me, in my opinion. And not just in my opinion, in absolute fact. If it weren't for the advance he sent me, I wouldn't have been able to pay for the initial treatment for my eye, or the recent bills on my car which I rely on to get to my day job. I would've been up shit creek without even a kayak, let alone a paddle, if it wasn't for Mr. Boyle, so I most definitely owe the man and I'm going to do my damndest to make up that debt to my satisfaction.
So, all that being said, it would mean a great deal to me if you would go buy his book, and buy the audiobook when it (finally) comes out. I'm not going to be making royalties off it, but I'm going to add in an ad for it on the blog, in the store page, and shill it in the podcast not just because I produced the audiobook, but because this man has shown me grace, patience, and understanding that I do not deserve, and this is my only real way of paying him back for that.
So Mr. Boyle, if you read this, I cannot thank you enough for all the kindness that you've shown me, and hopefully I can drive a few more readers your way. To everyone else, I think I've explained my reasoning behind this move adequately. If you think I'm needlessly shilling, or have no reason to do this, then you will not be missed. This man has ensured that I'm able to see properly, that I will have a working car with which to get to my job that actually pays my bills, and that I'm able to see properly. That may seem redundant, but my two biggest fears in life are going blind, and going deaf, so someone who has, unintentional though it may have been, kept that from happening has my eternal gratitude from the bottom of my cold, black, charred heart and I will do whatever I can to repay that debt.
Mr. Boyle is a good man. He has hired me to do his audiobook, and he has been undeservedly understanding about my medical problems. I have no problem whatsoever promoting his book, and I hope that this drives a few sales his way.
So thank you again, Mr. Boyle. I am humbled by your understanding, and will do my absolute damndest to make the audiobook of Queen's Heir a masterpiece. It will also have free advertising on my site and in my podcast into perpetuity, until my liver fails or I develop lung cancer, whichever comes first. I owe you.
Stop on by and hang out for a spell! I'll be updating this post after the fact with the link to the video on their YouTube channel so anyone who missed the live show will be able to go watch it as well!
So what with the election happening last week and my salt mining on social media, combined with the fact that it takes Audible about a week to verify my files, I forgot to let you guys know that my new audiobook has arrived! You can click the picture above to go to the Audible page and get a copy. It's got everything, politics, spaceship battles, brilliant characters, fun dialogue, laugh out loud moments, serious drama, space pirates, government corruption, and a strong female main character who just happens to be voiced by a man if you're into that kinda thing. What more could you ask for?
Also I should mention that ACX gave me 25 codes for FREE COPIES! So if you want to get a copy and pay absolutely nothing for it, get in touch with me via my twitter, gab, tumblr, or the plain old contact form on the website. You can find these on my social media page. Now several of these codes will go to friends, so I expect them to go pretty fast. Get your free copy today before you have to shell out your shekels!
And if that wasn't enough to convince you, you can hear the first chapter right here on the website to help you make up your mind. Though if my glowing reccomendation of a project I worked on isn't enough to convince you, you might just be a lost cause...
Original Description
Originally uploaded on May 30, 2016
Sorry this one is a little late, guys. It's been a hellish week this go-around, and between my day job and trying to get an audiobook for audible done, I didn't have much time to work on this one till Monday. But it is here, and I hope y'all enjoy!
Story can be found at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet
Music is Trio For Piano, Violin, And Viola by Kevin Macleod: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/?keywords=unfinished+trio
Trio for Piano Violin and Viola Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Social Media Dump
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/jimfear138/id1107844659?mt=2
Original Description:
Originally uploaded on May 23, 2016
The tale of murder most foul continues!
Story can be found at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet
Music is Trio For Piano, Violin, And Viola by Kevin Macleod: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/?keywords=unfinished+trio Trio for Piano Violin and Viola Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Original Description
Originally uploaded on May 16, 2016
Firstly I'd like to apologize to all my German-speaking friends. I never took German, so I just looked up some pronunciations and tried to approximate it. I hope I did okay, but I have no doubt that I fucked it up royally. In any event, I hope y'all enjoy! ^_^
Story can be found at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet
Music is Trio For Piano, Violin, And Viola by Kevin Macleod: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/?keywords=unfinished+trio Trio for Piano Violin and Viola Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Social Media Dump iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/jimfear138/id1107844659?mt=2 Twitter: https://twitter.com/JimFear138 Tumblr: http://jimfear138.tumblr.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/JimFear138 Blogspot: http://jimfear138.blogspot.com/ Bandcamp: https://jimfear138.bandcamp.com/
Original Description
Originally published on May 9, 2016
The thrilling saga continues!
Story can be found at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet
Music is Trio For Piano, Violin, And Viola by Kevin Macleod: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/?keywords=unfinished+trio Trio for Piano Violin and Viola Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
The new audio book hath arrived, right on schedule!
This time we're going through Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study In Scarlet!
Story can be found at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet
Music is Trio for Piano, Violin, Viola by Kevin Macleod: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/?keywords=unfinished+trio Trio for Piano Violin and Viola Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
