I’ve mentioned that there’s one character who appears in both Prophet and Cowry Catchers. People don’t notice who, though, unless they read the books close together.

I’m glad you enjoyed that dialogue. Putting that group of characters in the same space was bound to produce interesting results.

I loved the dialog in this episode. It flowed so naturally and the banter between characters had a very natural feel to it. I actually listend to it twice while at work today.

This audio book just keeps gettin better and better every chapter.

Chess – what was your podcast? Has it disappeared? I listened to a lot of Nate interviews. I might have heard that one.

Trillian – Thank you! I often feel that books and movies misrepresent depression and grief. Those feels don’t usually look like teenage angst and fits of violent weeping. They look like lethargy. They look like not having a reason to get out of bed. They’re sleepy, numb feelings. Anyway, I’m glad you found the responses realistic.

Lila – *blush* In one stroke, I’ve earned my explicit rating on the podcast and the comments section. Thank you. Chapter 11 is one of those raw, unpremeditated scenes where the characters just react. By chapter 12, they have time to think, and then things get more complicated.

P.S.: I’m typing this from my new computer. His name is “Silveo”.

I just wanted to say how much I am enjoying Cowry Catchers. I’ve been a LONG time listener over at podiobooks and have listened to more books from that site than I can count. You have created a fascinating world and the cast and audio production of CC is top-notch. I interviewed Nathan Lowell on a podcast several years ago I used to do and just love his stuff, so it’s neat to hear him in another author’s work.

Thanks for creating and sharing your work!

Regardless, welcome to the podcast!

The illustration is great as well, I particularly like the relative placement of Alsair and Gerard. I had a look at Bo’s deviantArt gallery – great stuff!

Alex

Silveo and Gerard – well, yeah, they’ve spent the summer sailing the small kingdoms and actually speaking to one another. However, the sea change that occurs between Book 1 and 2 (precipitated by the events at the end of Book 1) is that Silveo finally stops fighting. He still thinks this is going to end badly, but he accepts that Gerard isn’t going away and he admits the existence of the friendship that has already developed.

Norm was particularly good this episode (like I have to tell you this).

I’m delighted that you’re enjoying Cowry Catchers! I know that it probably seems like we podcasters are always fishing for praise, but when you send your work out into the void, it’s hard to convince yourself that it’s resonating unless people respond somehow. So thank you for saying hi and letting me know that you like it. I hope that you really enjoy what’s coming in the next few months.

Ever so sincerely,

Mary Laura
P.S.
Your casting for Cowry Catchers is perfect. (Sylvio will ALWAYS be Norm Sherman to me.)

That’s all I had for Book 1. Now, for Book 2 I’ve got a listener with Adobe Audition ($350) who will clean up noisy audio for me. This is very nice. Some of my voice actors don’t have quiet places to record, and none of the free/cheap programs are good at cleaning up noise. But, as you can tell from Book 1, you can limp along without noise removal.

I spent a year creating Book 1. I learned a lot (it was also a very busy year for me), and Book 2 will be more like 3 months production time. It takes an average of about 10 hours from me to create a 30 minute episode, so it’s a tremendous amount of time and a lot of organization.

If you want to get your feet wet with fullcast audio, I recommend listening to The Dunesteef Audiofiction Magazine (http://dunesteef.com/) and then volunteering. They’ll let you produce an episode and walk you through the process. It helps them out, and you’ll learn a ton about fullcast audio.

Listening to this interview made me interested in the story. So I proceeded to listen to the first book yesterday.

Wow. I am hooked. The artwork is amazing. The production is amazing. The story is amazing. You have done an awesome job with this podcast. I can’t wait for book two.

I’m delighted that people are finding me from Drabblecast. I hope the flow of traffic goes both ways. Thank you SO much for sharing the podcast with other people. That’s cool as can be. If they’re interested, but just don’t dig audio, they could read the PDF’s. It’s all there in text, although I think the audio enhances the story. You could also point them at the cast page. I’m finding that having a cast page with character portraits piques some people’s interest.

Ish and Gerard – yes, there are similarities. From early in the Share series, I knew I wanted Nate to voice Gerard. I wanted him to say yes so badly that I said ridiculous things (“only a few lines” *headdesk*).

D*Con – I’m planning on going. If you cosplay Silveo, I will die of squee (and then take pictures). I’m guessing that a number of the cast will be present.

Finally, don’t feel bad, but you haven’t actually found the Forums. I’ll respond wherever you post, but if you click the big orange Forum button on the right, you’ll find the land of threaded discussions.

Thanks again for sharing!

Anyway, getting to play a small part in Abbie’s big world has been a kick.

Which reminds me.

I owe her audio

I have been listening to “Prophet” and “Cowry Catchers” since I learned of their existence through one of my other favorite podcasters, Norm Sherman. Once I got into “Prophet”, I listened to it non-stop until the ending. I’ve been listening to “Cowry Catchers” religiously ever since and managed to scare my roommate, Scrawny-Bouncy, with my reactions to the story (HOW DARE YOU END EPISODES!). I’ve finally talked here into listening to “Cowry Catchers” and now she’s as rabid a fangirl as me. We’re working through “Prophet” while we wait to see what happens to the shelts of Wefervian.

This episode was the one that got me to come to the forums. I’ve been listening to the “Share” series for even longer than Abbie’s work and when I heard that Nathan Lowell would be one the voice actors I knew I had to listen. I know you don’t think you have a good voice, Nathan, but that was one the things I enjoyed about the “Share” books. This interview has convinced me that you’re the perfect person for Gerrad. Ish and Gerrad aren’t identical, but I think they would get along given the chance (World as Myth jump I guess…). They have the same sort of morality, so it’s easy for me to go from one story to another.

I’ve been pushing “Prophet” and “Cowry Catchers” to any of my friend who’ll listen, but it’s slow going. Most people don’t want to give audio a chance. I do think I’ve made some progress with a few of them… your bio background and intricate world have been working in your favor. That, and the dinner table discussions of the plot and how to make a shelt costume. Scrawny-Bouncy wants to go as Silveo to Dragon*Con. Any chance you’ll be here?

We’re eagerly awaiting the next installment. Thank you for sharing your world with us!

Glad you’re enjoying the podcast!

Also, I just found the podcast and I am enjoying it.

Chibis are stylized drawings of characters, often thrown into the margins of comics to depict silliness. They appear among more serious drawings to represent extremes of emotion or to lighten the mood. Chibis typically have little or no nose, huge eyes, simplified hands and feet, and exaggerated proportions. They are a type of characiture, but instead of mocking the subject, they’re usually intended to make the subject absurdly cute.

Putting that aside, BAD GRIFFON! BAD. (poor foxling…)

Alex – Bwahahaha!! The temples of Wefrivain are just very expensive aquariums. I took a marine biology class one summer, and we went diving Belize. It was awesome.

This reminds me of something else: There’s a moment a few episodes from now when the narration goes something like, “Silveo jumped back as though Gerard had handed him a live snake.” A more creative application of their environment would read, “as though Gerard had handed him a live cone snail.” But nobody would get that, ya know?

The real history of cowry shells as money is fascinating. They went all over the place.

I’m a medical professional and an American, which means that when I spell anything right at all (dubious), it’s spelled the way we spell things. Thanks for the tip. Merry Christmas!

However, I’ve given up trying to figure out what people will find disturbing. Many readers do not seem to find violence to children disturbing, but they are terribly disturbed by consensual sex between adults. Some people are not disturbed by sex, but are disturbed by the way religion or politics is handled. Some people are disturbed by the redemptive elements of the story – maintaining that certain crimes are unforgivable. I am routinely surprised by what bothers readers and what doesn’t. The only thing I can say for sure is that this story gets under most people’s skin at some point.

Paiter’s scene is a good one to be disturbed by (IMO). I intended it to be disturbing, anyway. I’ve got several kids in this story, and I’m not comfortable asking kids to play those roles. I’m still trying to figure out how to cast some of them. Fortunately, there aren’t many, and they don’t turn up until later, so I’ve got time.

Hunters Unlucky (not released) – product of my childhood
Prophet of Panamindorah – production of my high school yrs
Walk Upon High (not released) – production of my college yrs
Guild of the Cowry Catchers – production of my post-grad yrs

Those two stories are separated by time and experience. They are quite different because I was quite different.

It’s very good.

On the up side, I have two episodes to listen to right away. Oh, I’m looking forward to it.

I love the long reply above, where we get a glimpse of how much thought you have put into this universe.

In _Prophet_, Syrill tells Corry that there’s a whole culture of wood faun/cliff faun hybrids living in the border towns. They’re called satires. They’re beautiful and sterile and often become prostitutes. Laylan is also a half-breed – foxling/wolfling cross. (This is a problem later when he’s supposed to produce an heir.)

So faun/faun and canid/canid can readily interbreed, but not produce fertile descendants. As the pairings become less closely related, the likelihood of producing any offspring becomes smaller. Canid/felid, for instance. They’re both panauns, but not closely related. Then you get into the really tough crosses like faun/panaun. Successful reproduction in those pairings is incredibly rare.

None of this has anything to do with race. There are races of shelts. However, in a world with multiple sentient species, race doesn’t get much attention. There’s a mountain grishnard race (tall, darker hair, skin, and fur) and a lowland grishnard race (smaller build, blond fur and hair, paler skin). They can easily interbreed and have remained somewhat distinct only for geographical reasons. Gerard is of mixed mountain/lowland grishnard descent. Thessalyn is a classic lowland grishnard.

Sometimes he can be passably mature, but often he is embarrassingly impressionable.

However, it does not fix the old feedburner feeds(http://feeds2.feedburner.com/GuildOfTheCowryCatchers and http://feeds.feedburner.com/GuildOfTheCowryCatchers), to which everyone is subscribed. “Everyone” is only about 25 people at the moment, which is why I need to fix it now, while the potential for confusion is still small.

As of right now, all 3 feeds seem to get whatever I put out, probably because I’m still using the feedburner plugin. I think I’m gonna leave that alone. I did submit the standard feed to iTunes. I have no idea whether feedburner is smart enough to grab the stats, but as of right now, I don’t think I’ve dumped anyone off the feed. If you do have problems, please let me know. I really appreciate when people tell me that stuff isn’t working. Thanks!

Ah. This is good to know, but I don’t think it can be quite right. For instance, I completely deleted my podpress plugin, and I still had a feed, just no streaming players. I reinstalled it (new off the website), and my old settings were all still there, including the errors when I went to validate. Somehow, this info is saved outside of the podpress plugin. The feed isn’t broken. It just has errors in iTunes and I won’t submit it there until I can get them fixed.

I’m interested in your physical file. Could you email me? hilton (at) fauness (dot) com

I don’t think there’s any danger of Podpress changing stuff back. The whole problem is that it isn’t saving changes. When I go to validate the feed, I can see the whole code, line by line. I can see exactly where the problems are. It’s stuff that Podpress supposedly changed, but didn’t. I just need to be able to access and tweak that code that I’m looking at when I validate the feed.

How do you edit yours manually? Where do you find it?

I’m guessing that somewhere in WordPress’s labyrinthine file system is a file that is the xml of my feed. I could open it with Wordpad and edit it. But I don’t know which file or where to start looking or even if I’m right. I don’t seem to be asking Google the correct questions, because I’m not finding the answer online. If you know how I can find the xml of my feed, I’m all ears!

To answer your question: You don’t actually upload things to iTunes. You upload to your website, and then the feed “points” to that file that you uploaded where it’s sitting on the server. iTunes does not host content. It just points to existing feeds (which the author must create). All you submit to iTunes is a feed URL.

To upload a 30 minute MP3 to my website takes maybe 3-10 minutes, depending on connection.

The art is by Sarah Cloutier (http://melukilan.deviantart.com/). I started commissioning these illustrations back in 2007 before I even knew what a podcast was. Art delights me, and I really like her stuff.

I may commission some other artists as well. We’ll see whether Rah can keep up with the podcast.

I’ve finished recording the narration for Book 1 of Cowry Catchers, and I’m now putting all the narration lines together, so it’s coming along. Thanks for the smiles and encouragement!

Yours Sincerely
LUKE EDE FROM THE GOLD COAST IN AUSTRALIA ON YA MATE!!!!!