Paul Is Undead

How can you resist a book that begins:

For some, the most indelible memory of their television-viewing lives was the moment Jack Ruby assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. For others, it was Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing. For today’s generation, it might have be fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the coverage of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.

I realized television was more than sitcoms and sporting events on December 8, 1980, the night Mark David Chapman tried to lop off John Lennon’s head with a silver scythe.

Alan Goldsher's illustrated novel is more than your typical mash-up. It's a wide-ranging cultural satire that makes fun of the rock-n-roll "oral history" genre. In his quest to ferret out the real story behind The Beatles zombie-tude, the "author" interviews historians, psychologists, Liverpudlian nightclub owners, John Lennon's mom, and of course The Fab Four themselves, who reminisce together about such hilarious events as the time Ringo's arm flew across the stage during a concert, or George Harrison's fingers dropped off during a key recording session.

I myself haven't indulged much in the mash-up genre, but this one was so sharp and entertaining that I found it hard to put down.

The question was, since the book travels back and forth across the Atlantic, which way to go with the casting? Should we have an American spoof the Brits, or a Brit spoof the Americans? In the end I figured the Fab Four themselves had to be the key, so I sent the title to British narrator Simon Vance. Simon is a self-professed rock-n-roll history buff, and he recently recorded When Giants Walked the Earth, a biography of Led Zeppelin, for Blackstone. I figured this would be the perfect follow-up. And by all reports he has had a gleeful time with it. He tells me that, in order to preserve the integrity of the voice characterizations in the four-way interviews, he recorded each Beatle's lines separately, then edited them all together. That's above and beyond the call!

Word is that the book has been optioned for a movie, which ought to be even more fun.

Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion pubs in book form and audio on June 22.

Blackstone Cover Art

Sometimes we purchase cover art from the book publisher, or a film studio if it's a movie tie in. But for the most part we create all our own graphics here at Blackstone. Occasionally I pass through the graphics department and get hung up looking at the computer screens. It's fascinating to watch them build layers and manipulate images and fonts.

Unless you're a library customer, you probably haven't had a chance to see what these folks can really do, apart from the thumbnails on Audible or in our catalog. So today I thought I'd feature a few recent covers that caught my eye. (You can click on the photo for a larger version.)

This is Aaron Hoppe's cover for Tony Heald's recording of Elmer Gantry, which won an Audie Award in 2009:


The shabby marquee displaying the title is genius.

This is James Egan's design for The Man With the Golden Arm. We always think of the Sinatra film, but the book was written in the 40's and the cover reflects that:


Daniel Smith created this nice graphic for The Devil Knows How to Ride:



Andrew Farris's work for a gory murder-fest really pops:



Addie Black, who is also an accomplished painter, did this atmospheric work for the re-release of a stylish thriller:



And finally, a very cool design for Stephen King's IT. This was a co-publication with Penguin and we could have used their cover, but when Matthew Marley came up with this, it was too good not to use:

IT

I've been noting with no small amount of gratification the positive comments on Audible for Steven Weber's reading of Stephen King's IT. We took a bit of a risk on this one--Weber only had two audiobooks to his credit (albeit very good ones), and our co-publishers at Penguin Audio were a bit skeptical, but it turned out to be a big win for everyone. Weber approached the thousand-page project with a gusto that was infectious throughout the entire process. Yuri Rasovsky, who directed the production, noted after the first session how impressed he was with Steven's preparation, commitment and sense of humor, which never flagged during the fifteen-day schedule. I'm told that after one particularly long and grueling day, Steven flung open the door of the booth and staggered into the control room, shouting, "Blood! I'm covered with...BLOOD!"

Weber's reading is an object-lesson in successful risk-taking. His depiction of the Denbrough family's collapse into silence and grief is heart-rending, particularly the scene in which young Bill tries to lighten the mood by telling a joke--an attempt that falls achingly flat. (Bill's pronounced stutter, which could become tedious in the hands of a lesser narrator, is marvelously rendered.) By contrast, the scenes with Pennywise in his various incarnations are ratcheted up to a level that has to be heard to be believed--and they work.

It's refreshing to encounter a narrator who doesn't seem aware of the "rules." It's not a tidy, pre-packaged read. It's a wild ride, full of unanticipated line readings and emotional about-faces. That's not to say it isn't faithful to the text--he is very observant of King's stage directions and character cues. But he never shies away from the larger-than-life (one is tempted to say, outlandish) quality of the whole enterprise. And while there's never any question that he grasps the size and scope of the story, Weber never gets ahead of himself. Every scene is given it's full value. Nothing is rushed or glossed over for the sake of efficiency. This "in-the-moment" quality, rather than slowing the book down, actually makes it feel shorter. Even King's notoriously digressive passages take on an absorbing quality in Weber's rendition. Everything about this performance--the vivid delineation of each and every character, the near-improvisational approach to the text, and above all, the drive and consistency he brings to this most unwieldy of King's novels--makes this a recording that every narrator could learn from. I know I have.

Memorial Day

Saturday we drove 30 minutes north to Grant's Pass to visit the Grower's Market and buy some plants for the vegetable garden. I picked up some heirloom tomatos, celery, eggplant and basil. The garden got a head start two weeks ago with lettuce, snow peas, peppers and corn. (I think the birds got the carrot seeds so we'll have to try a different tack on that.) It didn't even occur to us that, being Memorial Day and all, we would run into an enormous parade that had most of the downtown area closed to traffic. After our visit to the market, we stopped and enjoyed the show for a while. The whole city seemed to be participating, to the extent that it's a wonder anyone was left to watch. There was a Volkswagon club comprising every sort of Beetle you can imagine, a huge children's string orchestra (the bass fiddles were on wheels and the cellos ran alongside carrying chairs), the local jet-boat organization, all sorts of floats and semi trailers, athletic groups, Boy Scout troops--it just went on and on. It lasted for about three hours, though after twenty minutes we felt overwhelmed and headed back to the car. Maybe people watch for a while then run back and join the parade, I don't know. At any rate, it was very festive.

Medford is about 75% retirees, most of them veterans of one sort or another, so the cemeteries are packed with visitors laden with flowers and American flags. The neighbors are playing horseshoes and barbecuing. The roads are crowded with campers, boats and every kind of recreational vehicle you can imagine. People head up to the mountain lakes, out to the rivers, or down to northern California. Spring was long, cold and wet this year (sleet in May!) so the abrupt change to clear skies and sunny warmth has propelled everyone outside to enjoy it.

We stayed home and cleaned. Not very exciting but relaxing all the same. The back yard needs a major overhaul, and the patio is stuffed with all the junk you throw out there during the winter and figure to deal with when it gets warm. Well, here we are.

On another Memorial Day note, I am overwhelmed by the response to Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes' superb novel about a troop of Marines trapped in an ambush during the Vietnam War. Just reading the comments on Audible, many of them from Vietnam vets, is a moving experience. Karl recently emailed our narrator, Bronson Pinchot, to let him know how much he liked the recording. Bronson is a talented, multi-faceted reader, and I've yet to find a book he can't pull off. But Matterhorn posed a unique challenge, with its huge cast of characters and authentic military tone. He spent a lot of time on the phone with Karl and they became very friendly. He even confessed to me that he had a bit of a breakdown at the end of the book. So it it meant a lot to him to get a nod from the author.

APAC and the Audies

The Audio Publishers Association Conference was held Monday, May 24th in NYC. I decided to keep the trip short and left Medford Sunday afternoon, arriving at JFK around midnight. Got to the Hotel Belvedere near Times Square at 2 a.m. Had to be at APAC bright and early that morning and was looking forward to a few hours of deep, restful sleep. Well, forget it--I was stark, staring, wide awake. Finally passed out for an hour or two and staggered over to the Westin at 8 a.m. for the conference.

I was pretty much running on adrenaline all day, which was okay because there was a lot to go around. The conference was extremely well-organized this year and the narrator constituency was large and lively. I started at 9 a.m. with a training session explaining the concept of visualization, which is fundamental to good narration. At 9:30 I dashed over to the "Dos and Don'ts of Home Narration" panel moderated by Sean Runnette, and expounded for an hour along with home narrator Renee Raudman, Harper Audio's Michael Conroy and Sue Zizza of SueMedia.

At 11 a.m. I switched to the publisher track for another Home Narration panel geared toward publishers and producers, moderated by John Goodwin of Galaxy Press and featuring myself, Cory Verner of Christian Audio and Bob Deyan of Deyan Audio. Attendance looked to be scanty but shortly after we got started people began filtering in and it ended up fairly packed. I thought we all did a pretty good job of laying out the pros and cons of using home narrators. Basically, you have to have a support structure for research, quality control and fielding technical queries. In Blackstone's case, since we have studios in Ashland and LA, it's not so much a money-saving thing as it is a way to broaden our talent pool. For the big publishers, considering what they've traditionally paid for recording, it's a huge savings. Some of them are doing it and don't mind saying so, others are doing it and don't want to talk about it, and some are very leery of the idea. For many, it's still the "dirty little secret" of the audiobook industry. But the need to bring down costs has everyone looking at it one way or the other.

I took a break for a while and did some visiting, then geared back up for a live ProTools software demonstration in the afternoon. Disaster lurked in the wings when we realized we were missing a ProTools hardware interface, but a local producer kindly snagged one from his studio and we were able to proceed after some vamping on my part. The purpose was to demonstrate how easy ProTools is for home recording once you get over the hump of setting up a template recording session. I think the point was made very well. I put together a PDF version of the demonstration, complete with screenshots, which I'm told is available to member narrators at the APA web site.

Tuesday I breakfasted with narrator Simon Vance, lunched with some of my Blackstone colleagues, shared a cocktail with a dear friend from DC days, Carol Monda (now also in the audiobook biz), then got ready for the Audie Award ceremony that evening, held at the Museum of the City of New York. Tragedy had struck over the weekend in Medford when I realized that my trusty tuxedo was full of holes, courtesy the variegated wildlife of Oregon. A quick shopping trip turned up a white linen jacket, black trousers and bow tie. I looked very Ocean's Eleven if I do say so myself. I certainly stood out, since no one else dared to break the fashion code by wearing a dinner jacket before Memorial Day.

The trip uptown was very exciting because my cabby got into a running shouting match with a bus driver as we careened up Madison Avenue. This went on for about ten blocks. But I arrived in one piece and set about searching for our guests.

The ceremony was a huge success, with an outdoor cocktail party followed by a lightning-fast award ceremony and more partying and shmoozing into the wee hours. Blackstone netted four awards. I was so tired that I introduced Ed Herrmann to a group of Blackstone consultants twice in the space of ten minutes. Ed tweaked me mightily and made a show of taking my wine glass away.

Next morning I had breakfast with my old friends Jennifer Mendenhall and Michael Kramer (pictured above with me at the Audies, photo courtesy of Jennifer), then headed to the airport for my return flight.

A Feast for King Fans

Blackstone, in cooperation with Penguin Audio, will be producing ten Stephen King titles which have never before appeared in audio format. The titles are:

IT
Cujo
Christine
Roadwork
Firestarter
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
The Running Man
The Long Walk
The Eyes of the Dragon

Five will be released in April, and another five in May of 2010. Blackstone will offer the library editions, and Penguin the retail and download versions. There will be some delightful surprises in the casting, which I'll announce as soon as we have everything in place. Stay tuned!

29 Gifts

Blackstone Audio has just released the audio version of this season's inspirational hit: the true story of Cami Walker, a young woman stricken with multiple sclerosis who rises above her depression and disability by giving away a gift every day for twenty-nine days. Each gift takes on a life of its own and becomes a wonderful story in and of itself.

There is a web site, www.29gifts.org, devoted to promoting a global gift-giving campaign, where you can join forums, read Cami's blog and view some of her media appearances.

Tavia Gilbert narrated this for us and sent along a wonderful note about the experience:

Once in a while, I'm given a book to narrate that I think the Universe wants me to pay attention to. 29 Gifts is one of those books. My story has some unique parallels with Cami Walker's story, and I found myself immediately resistant to trying her prescription of giving a gift a day for 29 days. There's some comfort in being habitual about behavior and attitude, but when I finally opened to mindful gift-giving of my own, I immediately felt positive shifts in my own sense of abundance and opportunity. I appreciate Cami's strength and determination to live her life to the fullest, and to share her gifts with the world.

29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life is available now from Blackstone and will be showing up on Amazon and Audible next week.