There are pros and cons to this method as you might imagine. As the Persistent Spirit story begins to enter its final phase and the end of the book is on the horizon, I find myself contemplating whether I might undergo the same process for the second book, A Shot in Time.

The cons

Time: writing and recording an episode consumes 15-20 hours of effort. Maintaining that each week with an increasingly demanding and unpredictable day-job has been, frankly, stressful.

Structure: episodes have a completely different structure to a novel, requiring continuing momentum, restructured scenes, and some point of tension at the end of each one. Unedited, this brings the novel a strange, pulse-like pace which now needs a further re-write.

The pros

Progress: episodes promoted regular writing. I believe I am further along in the story than I would have been without to self imposed demands of a regular episodic production.

Story momentum: despite the structure issue mentioned above, the story has a pace and continues to move along ithout getting bogged down and sluggish. Once the “episodic pulse” is edited out I think the novel will have an enhanced page-turning pace.

Feedback: reaching out with even an unpolished story to potential audience around the globe has generated feedback that has helped both encourage the work and help shape it.

What’s in store for 2009?

Not another audio book, that’s for sure. The pros most certainly outweigh the cons, so the audio book of the second Table Rappers book must correct some of the negatives of this years’ experience. Most importantly is the frustration from being unable to produce regular, weekly episodes. Book two (titled A Shot in Time) will not be released as serialised audio until it has completed the second draft.

That does not mean there will be nothing from the Table Rappers in 2009, however. I’m planning some short story dramatised episodes, including a cast of actors, full sound effects, etc. Doesn’t that mean even more work? Yes, but the work flow can be controlled around the production, and such a project is free from an ongoing, weekly deadline.

2009 is already promising to be a challenging year on both personal and professional fronts, so careful planning will be essential to achievement of my goals. I’m thoroughly looking forward to what might prove to be a formative year for the future!

In addition to the big writing project (TableRappers) and its supplementary tales featuring its characters, I want to create some old-style scary stories. By old style, of course, I means some that are genuinely scary!

I have a pile of horror short story compilations in my reading pile, acquired in recent months on the search for what I find leaves me unnerved and disquieted after reading. I found I left more modern tales behind and was drawn more and more to older, classic stories from the 19th Century up to the 1950s. The purchase of a Sony ebook reader (full review on this great device in the pipeline) has helped as it came packaged with 100 classic books, one of which was the complete works of Poe.

I had not read The Pit and the Pendulum for many years and have a stronger memory of the Hammer horror movie (I’m guessing it was Hammer) of that name, than the originating story. Reading was disturbing. I began to sense what such stories once kindled within me. I was glad I had not read this alone in a dimly lit room. Fantastic!

This contrasts with most of the modern  – to me that is post 1950s – horror tales I have recently read which try, frequently too hard, and fail, leaving me with little more than wanting my time refunded.

And so I am on a mission….

I wrote on my personal blog about creating a classic spooky tale audio episode for this year’s Halloween. If you like that sort of thing, please leave a comment and let me know what you would like to hear.

In addition, I have been reading anything and everything in the genre that I can get my eyes on with the aim of developing some of my own concepts into actual stories.

At the very least I believe I can create somethig that scares the willies out of me, perhaps it will do the same for you.