Category: Podcast

Books

Radio Free Burrito Presents: The Sun Goddess

Posted on By Wil

I don’t want to commit myself to making full-on Radio Free Burritos right now, but I do want to stay creative and productive while I listen to experts who are not fucking idiots and stay home until the doctors tell me it’s safe for everyone to go back to the Old Ways of three weeks ago.

I love narrating audiobooks. I love that my job is to read and perform, to bring stories to life, for people who want to be distracted and entertained. It’s a real blessing that I get to combine things that I love, and do them for my job.

So while I’m staying home and feeling grateful af that I can afford to be out of everyone’s way for at least several months, I want to do something, however small, to give people who are stressed out, overwhelmed, or just bored, something to listen to while they catch their breath.

And as long as this works (meaning I enjoy it and people want me to keep doing it), I’ll be reading short stories from the public domain every few days, and uploading them to my SoundCloud.

I read these cold, and I don’t do any editing, so you’ll hear me mess up, you’ll hear background noise, and it won’t be as polished as the work I’ve done for Big Audiobook, but it’s free, so back off, man.

Anyway, here’s today’s. I hope you enjoy it.

A Japanese myth, published in 1918.

blog

It’s Friday afternoon, so I narrated another pulp story.

Posted on By Wil

Yesterday, I finally turned in the manuscript of my novel. I’d been revising it for seven months, and by “revising” I mean, “trying to fit a scene in that I wanted to put into it, but which doesn’t seem to fit anywhere and also staring at page after page wondering why I ever thought I should tell this story in the first place.”

Yeah, it was fun. Thanks, depression brain!

Anyway, doing that narration last week did the thing I hoped it would do, and it opened up the door to the place in my brain where the creativity lives. With access to that room, I was able to step out of the room where Everything Sucks And It’s All My Fault And I’m Terrible At Everything So I Should Just Stop Trying and look at my creative work without fear or judgment.

I could be wrong (my agent and eventual editor will tell me if I am), but I feel like I spent all this time trying to make something better for the sake of making it better, when I had gotten it as good as I was going to get it on my own already. There’s a lesson in here about knowing when your desire to work hard becomes a self-defeating exercise in impossible expectations.

So anyway, it’s Friday, and I wanted to be creative and to feel productive, but I’m giving my writing brain a few days off because it’s been working really hard for a long time and it needs to recharge. Luckily for me, my performer brain was inspired to do another pulp fiction magazine audiobook narration, because it was so much fun the last time I did it, and the feedback was so positive and effusive.

Therefore, I am happy to present to you, Please Help Me To Die! from 1938, written by Leon Byrne, and found at the Pulp Magazines Project.

As before, you can stream or download from my SoundCloud. BUT FIRST YOU HAVE TO KNOW that the mic was hot, and I really needed a pop filter. The audio quality is not particularly great on this one, which is a shame because the story is awesome. But, I promise to give you a full refund for your purchase price if the audio quality does not meet your expectations.

blog

In which I narrate a story from 1930

Posted on By Wil

I took a vacation (the first real vacation I’ve ever taken in my life, where I just got to relax and enjoy myself without ever feeling like I was a Pokemon for people to catch), and it seems to have restored a lot of access to my creative self.

I’m still working through some story problems that I need to solve so I can do the revisions and add the scenes to All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, but I’m doing the work, even if I don’t have words added to the manuscript to show for it. That feels pretty good.

I’ve also been, while not exactly feeling great, getting better and feeling closer to “good” every day. Jesus, it’s been so long since I felt good, I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to have a day without sadness and anxiety in it.

But today, rather than feel creatively stifled and stuck in the mire of depression, I decided to get out of my comfort zone and make a thing.

So I went to Project Gutenberg, clicked through a few bookshelves until I got to classic Science Fiction, and decided to do an unrehearsed, essentially live narration of a story that was published in Astounding Stories of Super Science in 1931.

It’s not the greatest story I’ve ever read (if I’d read it before I narrated it, I wouldn’t have chosen it), but it’s a fine representative of that era’s genre fiction writing. I had some fun doing my best impression of someone reading it in 1931, and I recorded it to share with any of you who are interested in this sort of thing.

I can’t get WordPress to let me upload it, so you can stream it from my Soundcloud, download it to listen to later, or totally skip it. I’m not the boss of you.

However, if you do listen to it, I’d like to know what you think about the story, the experiment, and … um … I think that’s all.

Podcast

Did you know I have a podcast?

Posted on By Wil

There must be, like, fives of people out there who would want to listen to this podcast that I occasionally do, and I they don’t even know it exists!

elo44Well, let me fix that, and introduce you to Radio Free Burrito.

The current episode contains no secret messages.

This show features a whole lot of talking about stuff, including the JoCo Cruise, art, auditions, and why it’s great to do things that are hard.

So maybe give it a listen, why not, share it with your friends, and review it on the places you do that sort of thing.

stuff i like that you may like

Posted on By Wil

From the most recent Radio Free Burrito’s show notes: