46 thoughts on “In which I narrate a story from 1930”

1. YAAAAAAAAAY for vacation ( in an unspecified location… grin)

   Wil, I’m so stupidly happy that you and Anne had the vacation you wanted /and/ that you both deserved. I hope in the future, you’ll still come and vacation with us, and have a good time. You’re good people.

   Well, or at least, that your father’s third brother’s son will.

   With humor,
   and yes .. with love.
   -Martin

2. I’m so glad that you had a real vacation! Hooray!

   I’m very sad you’ve ever felt like a Pokemon for people to catch. 🙁

   So glad you are feeling creative! That’s wonderful that you got some work done on your manuscript! Victory!

   I think it’s brilliant you read a story at random. Downloaded Soundcloud so I can listen. Perfect timing! I was just about to listen to an audiobook.

3. Love the dogs barking in the background: isn’t it great to let the world in?

   The occasional fluffs are human. Why should recordings be perfect? It is a great practice to read stories out aloud. It reminds me of when I read to my daughter at bedtime. Special times. Usually I was reading children’s stories. I should have read her some science fiction.

   More please! (but only when you need to find inspiration). This works.

4. I especially loved the dogs aggressive barking as they were getting ready to run like hell at the mouth of the cave…they made me jump, lol. I call that perfect timing <3. I also have to admit that I felt bad for the creature, and I’m quietly hoping it didn’t die after all, but also stays wherever it went. On a side note…your Carnes voice sounded very much like Tony Randall, to the point that, for a while, I forgot you were the only one reading.

5. I am glad that you were finally able to enjoy a vacation, Wil.

6. This was fun Wil, thanks..
   I hope you don’t mind that I shared it to two of my favourite podcast groups as a recommendation to have a listen. One is a geek podcast – Geek Shock – who are sci fi fans among other geeky things, and the other is Monster Among Us Podcast which is all about cryptid creatures and the paranormal, and has people call in to share their supposed sightings/experiences. I hope they enjoy this as much as I did. If you ever do feel the need, please absolutely do it again. Thanks and take care.

7. That was great! What a treat!

   I loved the 30’s voices you chose. Dogs barking were cool.

   The story was … interesting. I agree, not much of a plot. And yet I enjoyed listening to it. It reminded me of old radio shows like ‘ The Shadow”. Some really great lines like “…as even the drug-laden brain of an opium smoker never pictured.”

   I actually felt kind of bad for the baby monster.

   Oh I do hope you do that again Wil. That was fun!

   1. I loved the 30’s voices you chose.

      You noticed! Cool! Thank you!

8. Hey Wil,

   How did I not know you are on SoundCloud? What Boggles my mind even more is that you only have 931 Followers! I definitely followed.

   How come your WordPress wouldn’t let you upload your Podcast? Reason why I asked is that I recently upgraded my WordPress account to the Business Plan so I was planning to upload my Path of the Morning Star Podcast on Native American Art and News there. Did you use your Customer Service Chat feature to ask for help from the WordPress Happiness Engineers?

   At first I thought the dogs barking were purposely added to embellish the storytelling. Until you made your side comment. lol

   Wenona Gardner
   White Turtle Rainbow

   1. How come your WordPress wouldn’t let you upload your Podcast?

      I’m self-hosted, so I’m a little customized on the back end, and it’s almost certainly not WordPress’s fault. It’s a weird JSON error, that may even be the result of the various privacy extensions I have on my browser.

      1. Wil,

         Thanks for replying to my question. I am not familiar with everything that entails with self-hosting nor am I familiar what a JSON error means so what I am going to mention may or may not help your situation.

         I am currently in a MA New Media Journalism degree program at Full Sail University. My last Multimedia Development and Editing class required us to record a Podcast, upload to SoundCloud and then embed the Soundcloud Podcast in a WordPress blog. So I went to my Soundcloud Podcast Track and copied the embed code and then went to my WordPress blog and switched to html and pasted in the embed code. However my Podcast did not appear in my WordPress blog. So I went to my Professor Jeffrey Sharon who hosts a Sports Podcast and asked for help. So my Professor said all I had to do was go to my Soundcloud Podcast and just copy the track’s url and paste the url into the WordPress blog. Which for me worked and a Soundcloud player appeared.

         Also when I upgraded my plan to Business Plan WordPress told me it comes with Two 30 minute sessions where you can directly talk to a WordPress Happiness Engineer through Skype. Recently, I told my Happiness Engineer I wanted to use my WordPress account to upload Podcasts which he pulled up the WordPress website and he looked up and showed me that there is a WordPress Soundcloud Plugin I could use. I am wondering if you can use their WordPress Soundcloud Plugin too?

         Even though you are self-hosted I am also wondering if the WordPress Customer Service Chat feature could still help you and might even know what that error code means. On my WordPress plan the customer chat feature is available 24/7.

         Just some thoughts,

         Wenona Gardner
         White Turtle Rainbow

      2. Wil,

         I just finished listening to your story. When I listen to you reading out loud, whether it is from your self published audiobooks on Bandcamp or a story like this on SoundCloud, I immediately think Wil would have been amazing in Forensics in school. You are a very natural and gifted storyteller. So eloquent. Such a soothing voice. I especially loved when you were reading the Choose Your Own Adventures I believe on Twitch with the kids who were swept up with every part of your stories. Listening to you I find is totally mesmerizing. You are truly a gifted orator. I would love to support you so I could listen to you read more stories.

         Wenona Gardner
         White Turtle Rainbow

9. Thanks Wil! This was fun. I would definitely listen to more stories like this (pulp or otherwise).

   Or, for somehting slightly different, have you done an audiobook of your short story Hunter yet? That would be fun to hear you read too.

10. I just finished listening to The Cave of Horror(s?) I loved your reading. Very clear, great diction and expression. Hard to believe you (or anyone!) could do this so well with no rehearsal. Bravo! I do hope that you read more. I would def buy audio books that were read by you! BRAVO!

    1. Oh boy! Do I have something for you, in that case!! https://wilwheaton.bandcamp.com is where all my self produced audiobooks live

11. Excellent! I’m tempted to start googling the science. I pronounce your experiment a success. I even like the interruptions, particularly the dogs. Please do more!

12. I don’t think that I know what a 30s voice sounds like but about 10 minutes in you were wearing a pinstripe suit and a fedora hat. I’m impressed that this is your first read through and remembered all the different character’s voices. How did you keep track? Anyway, I vote for continuing this experiment.

    1. I keep track of the voices by changing my posture for each character. That way, it’s in my muscle memory which helps. For this one, I was lucky that there were only three or four characters plus the narrator, and it was short enough that I could keep them clear in my memory. Glad you liked it!

13. Going to come back and listen later (as it is past my bedtime) but I LOVE this idea. Great way to practice your narration and expose people to some hidden gems and classic stories.

14. I like this a whole lot. I was hoping for 1930s voices before I started listening and I was not disappointed. I’ve also wondered if audiobook readers do different takes for different character voices or if they just switch while reading. I’m guessing it depends on the reader, but it was cool to hear you switch around voices as you read live. (You did that when you did the CYOA stories, but that seemed different than this.) I would love to hear more things like this.

15. That was super fun. You’re the cool Uncle that reads the scary bedtime stories that make you check the closet for the next month.

16. Nicely done! I think the big thing is to try new things. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. But, you’ll always lose if you don’t try.

17. I loved listening to you read the story. I liked it breaks and all–and dogs too! This was a lovely way to end the day. Thank you!

18. This recording is great so far. I’m still listening but i wanted to get a comment posted. Next time you are in the mood to do this any chance you could read some of Little Fuzzy? I loved your narration of Fuzzy Nation and it woudl be cool to hear you do Little Fuzzy which i think is public domain now.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Fuzzy

19. Thank you Wil! That was such a fun little story! I am a huge fan of Project Gutenberg, and classic sci-fi is so amazingly cheezarific. Also, any time I can hear you narrating is a win. You have long been a favorite reader of mine on Audible. Even the dogs were great. I thought for a few seconds they were just part of the dramatic effect, lol. I hope doing this made for a good day for you. Keep up the good work, and keep kicking that depression demon butt.

20. I always loved the 30s radio voice you did in Tabletop. This one sounds like you’re having a lot of fun. I’ve always had fun reading books out loud for an audience – usually my nieces, nephews, and little cousins, of course. Not too many opportunities to read aloud to adults 🙂

    Maybe I should do a librivox recording or something.

21. Poor little monster…

22. Hey there, Wil. Just came home from a stressful day and this story did wonders. It was great. Thank you!

23. I liked the experiment. Maybe more than you did. I think the “nothing happened” business is the way the author leaves this as something that might have happened in our world, and explain why you’ve never heard about it.

    I found it very interesting and enteraining how authoritative the Scientist was. I’m pretty sure that we’re supposed to think “If he thinks its dead, it’s dead”. But they don’t have their evidence. But we don’t hold science and scientists that way these days at all.

    I felt like I was listening to source material for D&D, or Call of Cthulhu (even though it isn’t Lovecraft), which seems to me to be a big thing that attracted you, too.

    I’m glad to hear you are starting to feel better.

24. Really enjoyed this story. Well read, thank you! And I hope you do some more. The older stories seem slow to us these days, but there is the chance to paint a picture in your mind of what is going on. The beastie itself is pretty typical; I loved the idea of his being 2-rather than 3-dimensional! Also I was sort of expecting it to be electrocuted, a la Quatermass and the Pit, but this ending, as you said, is actually better for the audience.

25. I loved the story. Listening to it with my eyes closed, I was on edge waiting to hear what would happen next. You did that in a perfect radio drama voice. Years ago, my husband found some old radio dramas and we used to listen to them at night sitting on my back deck under the stars. Your reading was as good if not better than most. I do not agree that “nothing” happened. Like all good sci fi, it was a parable of real life. In real life, we do not always get to rid ourselves of our demons. Most time they just crawl back from whence they come, only to reappear unexpectedly. Just so with the cave monster. I hope you do more.

26. Thank you for this experiment!
    I liked that it was not rehearsed or perfect. My extended family used to read these kind of stories to each other, I’d almost forgotten about it. This brought it all back to me, and since we’ve very recently lost 2 family members (how careless of us…) the nostalgia has been nice. It’s how I became a sci-fi fan, my cousins only wanted to read/hear those stories. We’d take turns and try to outdo each other on how good our reading was. I must say your character voices were much better than ours ever were!

    I hope you do another reading for us sometime!

27. Oh, what a treat! I stopped everything I was doing and just listened to it. Not really a very good story, but I loved hearing you speak it. You did the voices really well – I could recognize each one and it did sound 1930’s to me. Poor monster! But, like you said, you could imagine him slowly recovering from his injuries and just waiting down there, in the dark, somewhere, with all his other monster friends and relatives. More! More! We want more audio short stories by you! lol I’m also very glad for you and Anne that you got away. My last vacation was 2007, so I have to live vicariously through other people.

28. I’m glad you enjoyed your vacation. They are so essential to recharging the batteries! I listened to the podcast, the story isn’t my style. (I’m not into horror stories.) But you did a great job reading it, especially reading it “cold.” I hope you continue exploring this new venture.

29. Nice cold read! I really like the story, actually. Been a Heinlein and Asimov fan since I could read (I think I actually learned how to read with Heinlein books).

    I hope this helps your creative juices to flow!

    Love watching you each afternoon on TBD – two episodes of TableTop Monday through Friday is a great way to unwind after a day at the office.

30. Just downloaded the story for listening later, will report back when I have heard it. Kudos for stepping out of your comfort zone, Wil!

31. That audiobook reading brought a smile to my face. It was a bit like listening to an old-time radio play, with 4th wall commentary.

    Glad you got an actual vacation in, too.

32. So happy you got to have a good vacation! I absolutely LOVED the reading, please do more, it was excellent! I love the idea that you change posture while voicing different characters, that’s so cool!

33. Cool. I love old pulp sci-fi. Good reading voice!

34. Just wanted to say ‘thank you’. I am having a bad MH week this week and I’ve actually listened to this in the background more than once. It’s very soothing! I’ve also just joined Audible so I’m definitely going to be tracking down other audiobooks you’ve narrated. I really liked hearing you stop and check yourself once or twice to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n a phrase. Please, please do more of these! I actually liked that it was a fairly crappy story (that’s what growing up with Mystery Science Theatre does to a person). Also, thank you over and over for being upfront and honest about your MH journey. It’s helpful in a way that cannot be quantified that people like you and John Green (ie people I feel are smart, creative and Good People) are open. Thank you.

35. Hey man, I don’t know you at all but I saw you in passing as you were playing some game at the casino. Your exuberance is downright infectious — I couldn’t help cracking a huge grin of my own when seeing you have a blast. Thank you so much for being you!

36. Really enjoyed the reading reminds me of caves in England called Cheddar Gorge, will have great respect when entrying caves in future

37. Very well done Wil, I am happy for you.

38. Wil, that was very enjoyable. Here in Wisconsin I listen to old radio shows on public radio Sunday nights. It’s NPR’s Ideas Network, which I think is nationally syndicated. It’s great fun to listen to, especially when the big movie stars of the day showed up for a radio drama. We also have “Chapter a Day”, which is literally that: different readers offering up readings from books of every genre. That may also be nationally syndicated. I love being read to! Thanks for your words.

39. I loved it. It combined two things I love: old radio programs and old science fiction. I even liked the dogs barking because it gave the reading a sense of immediacy.

    Nicely done. Especially for cold read.

40. This was awesome. I really love listening to you tell me stories. Thank you for this. I read a lot of these old magazines when I was a kid. Kinda glad I did not read this one before I went to Mammoth Cave when I was 10 though. It would have freaked me out!!!!

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