WARNING: spoilers!
It’s quite a few years ago now since I did audio recordings of some of my short stories – so long ago that I had almost completely forgotten about them; decades now, actually. I recorded stories written by a local writers’ group (I had a Tascam four-track tape recorder, a great little gadget that allowed me to do overdubs, add music, etc.) and I contributed a couple of my own stories too, Michelle and The Slap (which you can find in my short story collection Twilight Dreams). I burned them onto a CD and ran off some copies. Not too many, of course – the group’s ambitions were fairly humble, and anyway nobody wanted to end up with a great stack of unsold CDs taking up space in their garage!
It was fun to create the CD, though, so I thought I’d have another go, this time with all my own of my material. As before, I only ran off as many copies as I thought I could sell, which wasn’t very many. Apart from the fact that you don’t want to become a nuisance to people by continually trying to flog something to them that they are lukewarm about, it was a bit of a bother to duplicate the CDs with my rather unsophisticated set-up, and my printer wasn’t really up to the job of producing professional-looking inlay cards.
I should mention that this was back in the day when posting things online wasn’t really an option unless you had a super-duper computer, expensive software and a subscription to the CostaFortune internet provider. Also, my expertise (!) with computers had not yet developed to cover stuff like that.
So, the project lay in abeyance… until a few weeks ago, when I rediscovered the recordings and had the idea of posting them online. Obviously, the quality is not A1-recording-studio standard (and my N.I. accent might be an issue for some listeners), but it’s not bad, and anyway squashing files down to a size that streaming platforms can handle smoothly means that audio quality diminishes a bit anyway even on professional recordings. I’ve posted a link to the stories at the bottom of this blog. You can hear them for free, but you can choose to pay for the download if you should feel moved to do so, which I would appreciate!
In the meantime, let be tell you a bit about the stories themselves. They make a slightly eclectic combination. The Slap and Michelle are both set in the real world. The Slap is about the dangers of thinking Mother’s opinion doesn’t matter. Michelle is about unrequited love.
The other stories are a little longer: The Rich Idiot’s Interference is actually an episode from my sci-fi novel No Paradox, but it was originally conceived as a short story, so it stands up well on its own. The germ for Stepping In, Stepping Out was the idea that there are people existing outside of our continuum who pay for the privilege of observing us – but from the inside, as if they were us. Something like this concept has turned up in the work of other sci-fi writers (for example, Brian Aldiss), though I wasn’t aware of that when I wrote it. Anyway, I think my particular take on it is original enough that nobody will claim that I have ripped off so-and-so’s work. Fans of C.S. Lewis’s theological works will recognise the title of the story God’s Quarantine. Lewis floated the idea (with tongue in cheek, I think) that the interstellar distances were God’s quarantine measures to stop the infection of a fallen race from spreading. I wondered what it would be like to be on Man’s first interstellar mission and find that some kind of field had been erected around our solar system which inhibited the function of the ship’s drive, because nobody out there wanted to meet us… I had some fun with this recording using the function on my computer that read text aloud. I was obliged to change the spelling of some words to get the right pronunciation, and tweak punctuation to get the vocal tones appropriate for the part of the sentence being spoken! (I think that modern text-to-speech programs are much more natural-sounding than they used to be.)
I should say that the short story collection that most of these tales appear in, Twilight Dreams, attracted a very critical review from one American reader. I’m not convinced that this person actually read the book. They probably dipped into their free Kindle download (it was on offer at one point), read a line here and there and went “Meh!” Exactly why they thought that qualified them to review it is more than I can tell. So I (and the great company of all writers everywhere) would like to appeal to you: if you haven’t read it, don’t review it!
In the meantime, happy listening!
David Ferguson is an author and musician. You can find his books on Amazon and you can find his music online on Spotify, iTunes, etc. (Search for David J. Ferguson. Don’t forget the “J.” because there are apparently a bazillion David Fergusons out there.)
Here’s the link to the audiobook:
https://davidferguson.bandcamp.com/album/five-steps-beyond-audiobook
...but you already knew that. 