We played books on tape (remember tapes?) for our children during long car rides. Our oldest taught himself to read at preschool by playing tapes and reading through the accompanying books.
And now it’s become of the main ways people get their stories–in audio books, so they can listen in the car, while exercising, or while ignoring the rest of the people trapped in their house during a pandemic.
I’ve now had the experience of helping to create a new audiobook–the audio edition of All That Was Asked has just come out on Audible (accessible via Amazon, too, of course). If you’re not already on Audible, there’s a free trial offer running that you can take advantage of (and keep the books to collect during your trial, even if you cancel).
We should have the iTunes version out Any Day Now.
I suppose this is a tiny bit like being a playwright and seeing your script being acted out on stage for the first time. First, you squeal, “eeeeeeeee, someone is reading my words!” and then you whine, “heyyyy, that’s not how you say ‘Ansegwe’!”
We have a wonderful reader, Trevor Wilson, who was amazingly patient with all my OCD-level requests for adjustments…especially with all those alien names to learn in this book. I know–they’re made-up names, right, so should it matter? Well, yes, since they all go together to help create a sound-image of an alien culture. I’m so happy Trevor made time to put his mark on this book. He had some really fun, creative takes on ways to make individual characters jump out of the text.
Trevor isn’t just a narrator, he’s a voice actor. That makes a world of difference. To create, in sound, the character of Ansegwe, he came up with three distinct voices–Ansegwe the memoirist, looking back on his youthful escapades, the younger Ansegwe, in dialogue, and the thoughts in young Ansegwe’s head. Each character, major and minor, has their own distinctive voice. He even gave two brothers–who only drop by in a few scenes–a unique, shared accent that still cracks me up, after, what? fifteen listens?
So if you like your books in sound format, mine is there for you, now. Enjoy!
Translations In the Real World (Photo by Tflanagan at KSU, Saudi Arabia, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
One of the first things people ask me when they read certain of my stories is “What’s the right way to pronounce all these weird words?” My stock answer is: “However you like! It’s all made up, whatever sounds right inside your head is fine by me.”
Starting the process of doing an audio book for All That Was Asked has forced me to face the fact that, well, really there is a “right” way. For one thing, the story centers on language–in fact, the working title of the book was “Translations by Ansegwe.” In general, for the stories where I have a made-up culture with their own language or an “evolved” culture that’s grown from more-or-less familiar cultures but uses a language other than English as their root language, I do know how those words should be pronounced. I’m that wonky sort that blows off an entire afternoon at Worldcon to attend a linguistics workshop, so, well, that’s where I’m coming from.
In the real world, I know French pretty well, I watch a lot
of foreign-language TV (though of course I’m relying on subtitles), I live in
place where I hear Spanish and Russian regularly, and I have technical-world
acquaintances with a great variety of language “homes” from India to
Europe to Africa to both Chinas. I’ve
struggled to learn a smattering of my culture-base language–Gaelic. And I grew
up being hauled around to various places in the U.S. and England. I even still “hear” (and alas for
spell-checkers, spell) most English as Brit-style. End result:
I love the interplay of languages and the way everyone talks. I
do not claim to be a polyglot, but I’m a diligent researcher and I just love
all those sounds.
In my writing, most of the problematic words are names, because I think of such stories as having been “translated” from the alien/alternate history language set. Names tend to get left over after a translation, because even if I’m translating a story from French to English, I wouldn’t change “Tourenne” to “Terence” or “Gervais” to Gerald, because a) the names aren’t really the same and b) the sounds of names add the flavor of a language without requiring a reader to actually know a foreign tongue directly. Spoiler? My current work-in-progress has characters named Tourenne and Gervais, and they live in a francophone culture that doesn’t exist anywhere in the real world.
In the made-up language base for All That Was Asked, I have lots of names for people, place-names from more than one country in the alternate-universe world, and a few name-based terms. (The academic types in the story have dreams of winning their version of the Nobel prize, so they talk about it a lot. The Nobel prize is named for a person, but . . . it’s a thing.) I wanted the central names to make sense, to have relateable sounds, and to have some commonalities. For instance, in English we have a lot of names that end in ‘-y’. I selected some sound elements that would fit into different names and tried to make them sound like they came from a distinct self-contained culture–except for a few names I made up specifically to sound like another culture, in the same world.
I decided on a family-personal naming order that made sense
for the culture–Family first, Personal second, and most people refer to each
other and address each other by their personal names, because everyone knows
what family everyone else belongs to. And
I made names longer than we’re used to in English. In our culture “power names” tend
to be short, in theirs, most people have multisyllable names, and powerful people
tend to have longer names.
For other sets of words in this story, ones that are “translated” to English, I “hear” the words in British/European English rather than American English, because that fits better with the social style of the people and gives it a little bit of distance for American readers. It may sound really fussy–especially for such a short little book–but I think having a clear auditory sense going into it helped me with building the alien culture. I just have to hope it carries through to readers and listeners–not a burden to cope with but an added feature of the story.
In my next post, I’ll give you a blow-by-blow pronunciation guide for All That Was Asked, with a few background bits to liven it up a bit.
One thing about the global economy…it’s January 31st in some places already. Barnes and Noble has the paper editions as well as the Nook version ready to go.
Meanwhile, Amazon is lagging behind, with just the Kindle version and it still is tagged as “preorder” . . . in the U.S. C’mon Jeff, don’t you want more money for your rocketship project? UPDATE: Amazon is up, in Kindle and Trade Paperback editions.
But you can download it from Amazon’s sites for the UK or India.
And it’s up at Canada’s Biggest Bookstore, !ndigo.
This first-contact story explores the challenges of communication between species–when neither side has a universal translator to rely on, when the alien in question is so odd most people would consider it an animal, not a person, and when accidents and misunderstandings get in the way.
Ansegwe’s a tagalong, a wannabe poet, and the pampered offspring of a rich, powerful family. When faced with the choice of leaving an injured alien creature to fend for itself in the wilds of a strange world, he makes decisions that force him to contend with his own failings–but also help him discover his mission in life.
Available in hardcover, trade paperback, and digital editions on January 31st. Pre-order now! Free shipping for B&N members and on Amazon Prime.
