Tag: Extra

Audiobook with Character Voices!

June 27, 2026 / Calise Sellers

Happy 23rd Birthday to Barry Anderson 🥳🍇!!

(Even though his birthdate and the year the first novel are taking place are never explicitly stated in the text. But it says in Chapter 2 that 4th of July is exactly a week after his birthday, so anyone with deduction skillz…)

But in honor of Barry’s birthday, in addition to having a mini party where I eat grapes with my friends, I wanted to post progress on a project I’ve been working on.

One of the weirder but more exciting things I’ve been experimenting with lately is what I’ve started calling “Audio Motion Capture.”

For this version of the audiobook, I record the chapter myself first, so all the acting, pacing, emotions, interruptions, and character inflections are mine. Then I use AI to trace that performance onto different voices. It’s less “AI reading my book” and more “my voice acting, wearing different costumes.”

Just like visual motion capture makes a performance like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings so full of personality and motivation—because you can still see Andy Serkis behind every expression and movement, while remaining much more immersed than if it were simply a dude in a costume—this method lets every phrase carry the exact emotions and inflections I picture as an author, while immersing you in how the characters would actually sound and how the dialogue should really land. And I don’t need a giant studio, or an Avatar budget to do it. It’s a one-woman show, with a mic, Audacity, and a few locally-based AI programs running on my 8gb of VRAM.

This is especially helpful for male voices. Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually pretty proud of my voicework for (male) Barry, Frank, and Nick, but it’s still pretty obviously a woman recording her best dude voices. Don’t worry, Nick sounds even more punchable than before.

One of the more exciting, while perhaps controversial, aspects (AI is already controversial, let’s just pile it on here), is that it also means that I can have consistent voices that go with the characters’ cognition. Along with Faces being consistent with underlying cognition, Justin and I have found that people of the same cognitive types also have body type patterns, and vocal type patterns. So with this method, each character has a particular stew of voices of real people from their cognition type, blended to the point that it’s not any of those people anymore, but the voices still follow the vocal typing patterns. I don’t want to give specific examples of the voices I used because the whole point is to create a new voice that’s fitting for the character, not have Barry sound like any one male INFJ(ej) or have Grape sound like any one female INFJ(ej), or have Dania sound like any one ESFJ(ej).

Down below I’ll have the current voices-draft of 1 – Birthday, cut into named chapter sections, the same sections as on the Table of Contents on the chapter itself. I’ll make a more permanent page for these in the future, as well as, like, pages of all content in timeline order, etc.

I might also include a few other fun clips, even some sneak peeks of later scenes, out of context, etc.

I don’t think I ever shared links to the updated, segmented clips of Chapter 1 in my regular recording voice, and I’ll share those too. That way if anyone prefers my good ol’ fashioned audio recording, you’re welcome to listen that way; plus you can appreciate my hard work and the fact that I spend hours upon hours getting the takes I want of these things, and editing them down.

But I hope this is exciting to you guys too. Limitless possibilities here of immersive radioshows, made all by my lonesome! Hey, if nothing else, I get excited every single time I hear Barry, my Barry, say his lines in his very own voice.

And with it being a story about transformation, liminality, masks, and how make-believe can reveal truth all its own, I think it’s pretty fitting that I can use technological transformation magic to make all these little pieces come to life… while really, it’s all bits of me! Theseus’s audio recording, I guess.

Much love,
<3 Calise

Cast Rollcall

ChatGPT suggested it’d be fun to do a comparison reel of all the characters saying the same sentence in each of their tones and voices, side-by-side. I loved that idea and casually recorded all of them on my lunch walk yesterday! The raw audio is like 5 minutes, uncut (besides a couple pauses in recording because I was walking beside traffic lol), but then the converted voice clip is short, but I’m very pleased with it!

Raw audio:

“Better than Expected” Character Reel

Out of Context Clips

These character audio clips are later in the story, but shouldn’t be too spoilery if you’ve read what’s posted of the story so far, up through Chapter 3 currently. Although they will have some spoilers if you haven’t read any of the story! So if that’s the case, go read Chapter 1 first, or listen below in the 1 – Birthday section.

Nick’s Purpose

Dania – Run on Sentence of Doom

Here’s the raw takes of a particularly hard paragraph in 2 – Lessons, followed by the character voice version of the final take:

Run-on of Doom pt1:

Run-on of Doom pt2:

Run-on of Doom pt3 😤:

Final take, Dania’s voice:

Steven and Grape – “Can’t Live in a Fairy Tale”

1 – Birthday

Character Voice?:

Conductor’s Baton/Back for Now

Original:

Character Voices:

Clip from 2 – Lessons

Lastly, I love how this section of Ch2 turned out, Driving Freedom, both my original audio, and with the character voices:

Driving Freedom

Original:

Character Voices:

Huzzah! Leave me a comment to let me know whatcha think! Have a nice day! I’m going to go eat grapes and hot dogs now, in honor of my sweet, crazy, sometimes-boy.

Prequel Scene | Little Barry Anderson

April 21, 2025 / Calise Sellers

Hi there! I’m trying to get better at casual posting on my sites. I’m trying to relearn that passionate and casual can coincide. Because I’m definitely not going to stop being passionate. One of the top traits on my character sheet is that I care about things intensely, lol. So I’m trying to figure out how to mix that with throwing flower petals along my way, letting things get the reactions they get. If you’re passionate about everything, you can’t very well be perfectionist about all the things you’re passionate about. To quote a favorite character of mine, “One might go mad.”

So here, with all the cazzz (there is no good way to spell the shortened version of “casual” in English!), is a prequel scene to my beloved flagship story, set when my protagonist is five, from his mother’s point of view.

My writing focus is always the characters, 100% (an EP writer’s first step), and one of my favorite things, since I was a lil tiny writer, has always been jumping to different points in a character’s life and seeing who they are at different check-in points in their lifetime character arc. Over the years since Barry’s inception, I’ve done that with him more than any of my other characters, with three different main novel plot arcs set at three crucial points in his life—16, 22, and 40—and tons of flashbacks to all the times in between.

For anyone who may not have read my fiction before, this is a silly, seemingly mundane lead-in to the way I write, that is actually critically targeted at the themes of Barry’s story. There is humorously no mention of the magical elements of the story in this scene at all. But poignancy happens within the mundane moments of life. Psyches are shaped in the quiet moments like these, where conversations happen, questions are asked, and childhood worldviews are developed into grown-up ones.

This scene, while on the surface just about a mom of two young boys having the kinds of crazy interactions that little boys have, shows a seemingly simple conversation that shaped who Barry Anderson is, and his relationship with his selfness. It’s technically foreshadowing… but in a way, aren’t all our childhood experiences foreshadowing for who we become? Children are such fascinating summations of their grown-up selves, even with all the choices in the world open before them to choose who they ultimately want to be. It’s always my soapbox that people are both always their forever-selves, and who they chose to be with every ever-changing day.

Barry, in all the ¾-of-a-million words I’ve written of him, is always as portrayed here–passionate, dramatic, a little whiny sometimes, but deeply invested in the questions of the Universe and what defines self, and gender, and what makes people matter. He grows with every one of the hundreds of thousands of words I put him through (often kicking and screaming), but it’s in the quiet and the silly that the images of the world take shape for him. This is the seeds of Barry’s relationship with Barry, starting from being very smol.

So, without further adieu, or somethin’, please enjoy five-year-old Barry Anderson… and three-year-old Nick Anderson 😱 !

Barry Chapter 3 Intro

October 13, 2022 / Calise Sellers

It’s up! “Sons and Daughters,” Chapter 3 of Barry Anderson: An Unexpected Fairy Tale, is live and you can read it here! Or go here to start at 1 – Birthday. (There is also 2 – Lessons but I’m assuming you know how numerical sequentialism works.)

3 – Sons and Daughters

I think quoting my favorite lines would in most cases be either spoilers or punch lines (or my slightly more scandalous phrases like “plug becoming an outlet”). But to share, some of my favorite moments in this chapter involve Nick playing video games on the internet (😱), Dania and the “real” stories of Snow White and Cinderella, along with why fairy godmother spells have time limits whereas color magic doesn’t, and Grape’s experiences with vintage dresses and spoons, the physics of teleportation magic and weebs, alien plush toys and the Mionn a Draíocht, Lassie and hair ties. There’s also lots of sons and daughters and the roles they play.

I’m just going to stop telling you guys how long chapters are, so you don’t get scared away…

Nah, who am I kidding? It’s 41,232 words and I love every stinkin’ one of them. Yes, that’s two-thirds of a respectable novel length, in one chapter. Yes, that means that chapters 1-3 together make 82,666 words and they say 100,000 words is entering “epic novel” length and you sure as inclement weather better have something important to say if you’re going to go off that long.

And Barry is 30 chapters long. Before the sequels. And I’m not going to promise this will be the longest chapter. It most likely won’t be, knowing what’s ahead.

But every line is important to the picture being painted. Believe it or not, with my casual tone and overuse of words like “really” and “stuff,” every phrase and interaction is very intentional. The way someone moves their eyebrows or when they choose to interrupt says volumes about their internal turmoil, whether they realize it or not. And Barry has a lot of internal turmoil.

Despite the barrier that length might be for some readers, Chapter 3 is my favorite to this point and I hope it really shows the audience where we’re going, overall. Two points make a line, but you need three points to make a trajectory, to see whether it’s going to be a straight line or not. Chapter 3 completes the first small plot arc of the story and finishes establishing the themes and where you can expect this very long story to go. It has a lot of establishing to finish, before Chapter 4 is off like a rocket into the plot moving forward.

Each chapter is more like a mini era, that turns the plot and character development in its own unique way. Each has its own attitudes, themes, and events that couldn’t happen in any other chapter because none of the characters are in the same place from chapter to chapter.

To quote Stephen Schwartz, as quoted in 2 – Lessons, which is in turn a paraphrasing of Heraclitus, “You can’t step in the same river twice, the water’s always changing, always flowing.” I only have 30 chapters over the course of a single year to change this boy’s life, and each one of them needs to do something different. If anything, I’m rather stunned that 1/10th of the chapters are live now, and mildly sad to never have those three mini eras to write in again, at least from Barry’s point of view.

All that being said, I really hope to get a move on and not post only one chapter a year. I have other novels to write too, and I can’t wait 27 more years for this one to have its full effect. Although it’s not like I’ve only been writing chapters 1-3 the past few years by a long shot. Chapters 6, 8, 12, 15, 16, and 18 are all already longer than Chapter 1 (which was 12,700 words), and there are no chapters with under 500 words written (the climax chapter having the least written prose atm).

But Chapter 3 is very dear to me. It’s okay if you maybe don’t know what to think at this point, or for a while in this chapter; neither does Barry. He’s feeling torn every which way and if adults disagree so thoroughly on these topics–things like gender and attraction, fate and destiny, responsibility and trust, fairness and defining yourself–then how is a sixteen-year-old (usually) boy supposed to figure it out?

It’s okay to not be able to tell where I, as an author, stand on these things. 😉 Like Barry’s finding out, the universe has a physics to it, but none of it is simple.

Eh, or just take it as a fairy story. Like Puck says in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream…

To quote Barry in the chapter in question, “Mom, maybe stop trying to make sense of the supposed decisions of a trippy dreamland dimension. I’m not sure logic and rationality are at work here.”

If you don’t want to yield to themes that offend, feel free to treat my very long writing like a fever dream with a lot of cleavage. That’s certainly what Barry would prefer to do.

Along with the chapter, here are some other Barry features that have been updated, so you know where to find them:

Chapter Quotes

Chapter 3 is the first to go live with its chapter heading quotes, but now these are a staple of all the chapters, and I’ve gone back and put the ones at the beginning of 1 – Birthday and 2 – Lessons. I have these selected for every chapter through the end of the story and I love how they illustrate and encapsulate each mini-era.

Each chapter has an actual, historically-written quote, written by an author with a national and cultural background that’s relevant to fairy lore, such as Greek, Irish, French, or German, and Barry-relevant specialties, such as philosophers, scientists, or fairy tale writers.

Each chapter also has a plot and theme-relevant song lyric quote from the soundtrack of that chapter, and I have zero pretension when it comes to the songs in this story. This leads to satisfying and amusing combinations of archaic and high-brow historical quotes, beside goofy pop and children’s song lyrics. Some of my favorite combos are Socrates and the Spice Girls, Tennyson and Taylor Swift, Aesóp and Elvis, Carl Jung and the Cars, Shakespeare and the Beatles, da Vinci and CHVRCHES, Ovid and Sofia the First, and the Norse Vǫluspá and Barbie.

But they each triangulate the themes and vibes of the chapter they head, and I hope you enjoy them from here on out.

Song posts

In that same vein, I am planning to have a post for each song in the soundtrack, bringing out its significance to the story and the themes and motifs I use it to illustrate in context. There will also be posts about the overall motifs of the story, which are a big deal for the meta of the story and symbolism I’m kinda super extra about. Very few of these posts are up yet—less than I would like—but I hope to post more of these soon.

But I don’t think everyone was aware of the ones that have been posted, so I thought I’d point them out:

The post for St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion) by John Parr discusses foreshadowing, omens of fate, and holding onto the future we planned, when we’re not genre-savvy to the serendipity in our own lives. Maybe don’t fight the foreshadowing; it’s not always as subtle as we think.

The post for Let’s Hear It For the Boy by Deniece Williams discusses both the vibes of the Barry soundtrack and my beloved use of irony in lyrics, as well as celebrating my protagonist boy and the beloved mess he is.

Those are the songs from Chapter 1, and I only have one of the three songs from Chapter 2 up.

The post about When You Can Fly Again from Fancy Nancy is an exploration into Dania’s motives as she gets overexcited and maybe a little bit silly, not understanding why her little butterfly might not want to go do pretty sparkly things with her, but how much she wants to help him fly.

Considering I finished writing the post for House of Gold by twenty one pilots last October (foolishly waiting to finish the one for Trying On Dresses by Darby, which I still haven’t finished) I’d like to post it soon. That one is about mortality, legacy, and death in fay culture and Barry feeling torn between his two worlds; it has a lot of pretty and potent prose, if I do say so myself, and I’m anxious for it to be read.

And Chapter 3 has three more songs to elaborate on, so I really hope to write up these things soon.

Chapter Icons

Silly little thing, but a while ago I wanted chapter icons for my own benefit, just simple images that symbolize each chapter, which I could use for my own menus. I’ve made seventeen so far, and now the first three are on the menu and the chapters.

Chapter Bookmarks

Despite being a mean author who expects people to read 41k words on a single web page, I do actually want chapters to be accessible and don’t actually expect people to read any chapter in one sitting, lol. So now, at the top of each chapter page, there are actually bookmarks!! Section headings would throw off the groove of the chapters, but I feel like casually naming parts of the chapter with titles that you’ll understand if you’ve read that part, but won’t spoil ahead of time, actually add to the chapters, hopefully. So now Chapters 1-3 have sections at scene or concept breaks, every 500-1500 words. They were really fun to name anyway.

And as I release audiobook versions, I can also break up the tracks at these same breaks and use the same titles. Ultimately I’d love to have a playlist of all the audiobook tracks, with the soundtrack songs intermixed where-ish they go with the prose and events, so you can just pop the playlist on and get the whole Barry Anderson experience in order.

Which, granted, will eventually take months to listen to 😅 but it’s fine. Please love me despite my super extra 🙏.

Media Glossary

Starting with the Extras for Chapter 2, I included a glossary for the non-English words used in the chapter. (This glossary is going to be crazy long for Chapter 11 and the research might kill me lol. Although my Arthurian research for Chapter 12 is a lot more extensive.) Chapter 3 has a decent amount of non-English phrases, so it has that glossary included in the Extras, but 3 – Sons and Daughters also includes a large amount of media and story references (and science-related terms) that Barry often mentions off-handedly. I want these references to be accessible to readers, even if they haven’t seen all of the media referenced. So there’s a glossary for these references on the 3 – Extras page. And, shocking to no one, I used it as an opportunity to commentate, elaborate and joke about the different media, and use them to bring out different things about the story. Hopefully they’re a fun read, even if you already get the references to FPSs, Star Trek, He-Man, Bewitched, or Fibonacci. I’m a girl of varied interests–and therefore sometimes so is Barry 😉 –and my references and jokes reflect this.

Anyway, in spite of so much preamble, I truly hope that you enjoy 3 – Sons and Daughters, and that it helps you explore complex questions about fate, trust, chaos, gender, and adulthood, with some giggles (and maybe some tears) along the way.

3 – Sons and Daughters

Tag: Extra

Audiobook with Character Voices!

Cast Rollcall

Out of Context Clips

1 – Birthday

Make-a-Wish Morning

9:42am

Glitter Baby

Why Do You Want to Tell Everyone?!

Flip Book

Fairy Name

Frank’s Reaction

No “Off-Switch”

Stairs

Purple Stranger in the Mirror