My third audiobook is available from Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. It's called Dinner on a Flying Saucer and is written by Dean Wesley Smith. The publisher's description is as follows:
Sometimes, when a fella gets to help out with fightin' a war between two alien races, it's just not such a good idea to tell your wife. Sometimes the truth just isn't good enough.
This is my favorite of the three I've done so far. It's a good tall tale and it's got accents; I particularly enjoyed playing the husband as gregarious and over-the-top and the wife as quiet and deadpan.
My latest audiobook: Your Average Ordinary Alien, written by Adam Graham. Available from Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.
The description, in the author's words:
Kirk Picard Skywalker is an unemployed sci-fi fanatic who dreams of being abducted by aliens from outer space. One day his dreams come through and he's horrified to learn that the aliens are all too ordinary.
It's the story of an unemployed computer scientist and his long-suffering girlfriend -- can't imagine what drew me to it -- and gave me the opportunity to flex some comedy muscles and play three characters plus narrator. It's a fun read, a bit of good-natured but ultimately sympathetic skewering of fanboys, and it made me smile. It's also got a Christian message -- a bit outside my usual, more cynical milieu, I suppose, but "Work hard and be kind to people" is, I think, a sentiment most everybody can get behind.
As you may have guessed from the various not-so-subtle hints I've been dropping over the past month, I've started recording audiobooks.
The first one, Dinosaurs in the Home Depot, written by Bret Wellman, has been released, and is available from Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.
The audiobook is 18 minutes long and delivers what it promises. There is a Home Depot. There are dinosaurs in it. The story does not waste time on details like why there are dinosaurs, why somebody decided to leave them in a Home Depot, or actually bothering to give any of the characters names (unless you count "the ugly giant" as a name). It's mostly people fighting dinosaurs with power tools.
If you want to give it a read before you buy, it's available for Kindle, or you can read it for free on the author's website.
It's also bundled with Audible's DRM. Staunch anti-DRM advocate that I am, I regret this, but there's nothing I can do about it except let people know before they buy. You shouldn't have trouble playing it under Windows or OSX, and there are clients for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry as well. I haven't tried it under desktop Linux yet; I've read that the Windows player works under WINE, though users have reported playback issues with recent versions. You can read more about Audible's DRM format at Wikipedia.
I've got two more audiobooks coming sometime in the next few weeks; I'll write about them when they're available.