I guess any chance I had to pretend that I wasn’t the author of this novel went out the window when I recorded an audiobook version of the first chapter, in my voice.

Still, despite the very silly premise, and my inability to do male voices (which is a problem less often in Barry’s case 😏), I think I have decent comedic timing, and it’s exciting for me to hear the correct inflections for each of the characters’ lines.  It feels like I’m listening to my friends talk, even if it’s essentially a very painstakingly edited version of me playing with dolls in my bedroom.

In fact, it took multiple months longer to get this out than it should have, because Audacity decided to flip out and put all my clips into a blender, and delete everything before a certain date, but I went through every single 3 second clip it still had (there were over 3100, and they were all mixed up, and most of them duplicated) to try and salvage what I could.  As it was, the only reason I have the original version of the first 20 minutes (all the actual recording files and bloopers tragically lost), is because I was obsessed enough with listening to myself talk that I’d exported a draft version of the beginning, just so I could listen to it over and over again.

I really wanted to get this up today, because today (June 27th) is Barry’s birthday (is that a spoiler?  I never actually mention the date in the story.  It’s not hard to deduce however), and toiled with extra rush this week trying to get it up, and was still only able to post it this late in the day, trying to get it the best I could.  But oh well, it’s still a good tribute to my favorite little idiot, that I’m managing to post it on his special day.

Hopefully this audio version of “Barry Anderson – Chapter 1: Birthday” will both enable people who find it easier/more convenient to listen than to read to get the beginning of the story, and is also hopefully a fun dramatization of the beginning of a pretty Grape, er, great adventure 😉.

(That link is to the audiobook homepage.  You can listen to the file embedded, or download to listen elsewhere.  For free, obviously, yay.)