Discount Dan

Hey, folks!

Sorry it's been a little quite around here lately. Con season has started and things always get a little hectic. A couple of weeks ago we were manning a booth and selling books at Lexington ComicCon, and then we had a very short reprieve before GaryCon, in Lake Geneva, which happened last week/weekend.

Both were awesome, though GaryCon was especially amazing. I did a couple of signings but mostly I got to play lots of DnD--and for the first time I did it as an attending Guest of Honor! Plus, I got reinvited back to the Celebrity DnD game and we continued our session from the previous year. Blood and battle, monsters and mayhem. What more could you ask for? Attending players this year included Joe Manganiello, Vince Vaughn, the Big Show, Tom Morello (Guitar Player for Rage Against the Machine), Chris Prynoski of Titmouse Studios, and Luke Gygax (son of legendary DnD inventor Gary Gygax). My good buddy Dakota Krout also got to come this year, which made it even better. It was a wild and surreal experience, to say the least.

And now that I'm finally back from that... The kids are going on Springbreak, so we're taking a little camping trip for a few days. And once we get back, it's off to Atlanta for JordanCon. Looking forward to that as well, but me word count has definitely taken a hit this month.

I've also been spending an inordinate amount of time doing audio recording. I'll admit, I might have a little problem. I have ADHD and though a lot of people tend to think that folks with ADHD have short attention spans (which can be true), a more accurate definition might be someone with a "disregulated attention system." For me, I often get hyper-fixated on stuff -- to the exclusion of almost pretty much everything else in the world. I tell people my wife is like a Swiss Army Knife -- she can do a million different things, often all at once. Me? I'm a meat cleaver. I can only do one thing at a time, but I tend to do that one thing pretty well.

That focus is part of what has helped me write so many books, but it can also work against me.

In this case, I've got hyper fixated on narration. I was having a really hard time with it and it was really kicking my ass there for a while. Naturally, my stubborn streak kicked in and I started hyper focusing like some kind of messed up super power. I spent hours (maybe days) working through online courses to try and get it right. It ate up a lot more brain space (and time) than I'd like to admit, but I have finally emerged like a moth from a cocoon and now I feel like I have a better handle on things.

At least, enough so that I can think about other things again.

Anyway, I've got the first eight chapters of Discount Dan recorded. I haven't sent them off for mastering (that's sort of like the audio version of editing), but they are still pretty clean and I'm finally happy-ish with the result. I wanted to share the end result and get some additional feedback for anyone who likes audiobooks. The bookfunnel link above will allow you to download the files all at once and if you have the bookfunnel app, you can just listen through as though it were a normal audiobook.

Again, it's only the first eight chapters, but I want to make sure this is worth doing before I sink even more time into it. Please let me know what you think. If there's anything you would change (is the pacing too fast, do you like the character voices etc) and if you'd listen to an entire audiobook! Anyway, that's all I've got for now, though I promise I'll drop a new chapter tomorrow. I've got it finished and I just need to do a quick editing pass.