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Meta-y comments over at amplificathon have me thinking about the PodBang experience, but I don’t have anything interesting enough to post for public consumption over there.
I’d say PodBang went smoothly for me, which is huge, considering how scared I was in the period between signing up and getting assignments.
My biggest crisis was probably the panic attack over finding a story that fit the many vague “I’ll know it when I see it” sort of requirements I had in my head. Given the size of SG:A fandom and the fact that I haven’t actually *read* much SG:A fic, I was sure the perfect story was out there, but I was afraid it’d take me the entire three months just to FIND it. Happily for me, it only took a couple days… most of which turned out to be wasted effort.
Lesson Learned #1: When people on rec communities say a story’s size is “100K”, they probably mean the html file is 100 KB, *NOT* that it’s 100K words. Wasted an embarrassingly long time sampling fic on crack_van and other sites before I realized 98% the stories I was pinging on were *way* too short.
Once I came across “The Kids are Alright”, though, it clicked for me right away in that Goldilocks way. All the other stories I’d tried always had some element that was “too much” or “too little” and this one was “juuuust right”. The length was long enough to qualify without being so long that I’d risk biting off more than I could chew. There was a nice balance of shippiness vs. not, a nice thread of sexual tension through the whole thing without getting super graphic, the character dialogue felt spot-on and fun to read, and it was just a story that I really, really *enjoyed* a lot and thought others would, too. I was *so* relieved that nakedwesley got back to me pretty quick with a “yes”, because I think I’d have defaulted right then, I had my heart set on it so much.
Once I had the story, I somehow worked it out that I could read a modest average of two scenes a day and get the whole thing read, edited, and ready for beta by the November 1 check-in date. (This was my first ever fannish gift exchange, and I wanted to leave *plenty* of wiggle room.) By mid-October, I was well ahead of schedule, and took a few days off… which then stretched into more than a week out of my own laziness. *_*
Lesson Learned #2: I am a lazy, lazy wench. (OK, I knew that already. :P)
When I got back into it, there was no way I would finish by November 1, and decided it would be best to edit the first half and get that beta’d, to give myself time to recover in case the beta came back and told me the whole thing sucked or something. :)
Editing on that first half was harder than I’d anticipated. Somehow between my first podfic and now, I’ve gotten really bad with the overthinking things. I doubt that there were three sentences in the entire recording that I just read once and kept going. I’d a few lines, then have a moment of “that was too easy - I must not have done it right” and go back and do it again with a little different inflection, just to have a “second take” (or third, fourth, fifth…) So the editing process was a *LOT* of lining up umpteen different versions of the same lines and trying to pick the “right” one without breaking continuity between that line and what came before/after, and THEN going back through and fixing almost every pause between lines, because the first phase has left cut-off breaths, clicks, and too-long/too-short pauses between almost every line.
Lesson Learned #3: Chill. The. Fuck. Out. The tenth time reading that same line of dialogue is going to sound a hell of a lot like the ninth and the eighth, and yet during the editing process, you’ll *still* sit there like a moron trying to figure out if #8 is more effective than #9 because there’s just a hint more emphasis on the final syllable or something. Just PICK ONE and move on! (Or, better yet, have faith in one of the first two or three tries and don’t record ten versions in the first place.)
Some combination of lesson #3 and a boost of confidence from the first beta made the second half go much easier. There was still a lot of line-by-line editing, but the “just pick one” part got significantly easier. By the time I turned it in, I was pretty darn proud of the finished product... and while that feeling's deflated somewhat by post-rollout ennui that seems to make all the good bits only half as good, and all the flaws ten times as bad, I'm still pretty happy with it, overall.
My only other crisis happened *after* I’d submitted the recording. I’d used the freeware podbook compiler that everyone seems to point to for PC users, but I happened to open the podbook in Quicktime, and noticed some weird technical issues that hadn’t been apparent when I listened to it in iTunes. I was a little freaked and tried an alternate way of creating the m4b file. That one *seemed* to work ok, but as we found out after the reveal, *that* one ended up not saving the cover-art correctly. I may go with the original method of podbook creation and see how it goes. Maybe no one else will even have the “problem” I noticed, and it was just a fluke. *shrug*
That’s one thing about podfic that I have a little trouble resigning myself to – I can only go so far on the technical side of things to make sure everything is recorded all right. It may play fine and sound fine on my equipment, but on Listener X’s iPod, or Y’s high tech sound system, it could sound like CRAP, and I’d never know. It’s kinda frustrating for a control-freak like me.
Probably my biggest *surprise* is how exciting it is to have the Mag7 story read for me. I haven’t actually listened to much podfic myself, yet, so I felt kinda “whatever” about the “receiving” side of the exchange when it was first announced. Since getting my gift, my attitude’s shifted a lot, though. I have a new car that takes USB sticks, so I no longer have to download and burn a million CD’s to listen on my way to work, so the process of how/when to listen has gotten a lot smoother. Also, just the fact that cookiemom actually read me a *MAG7* story and getting to listen to the boys and their antics vs. a fandom that I might not be as passionate about is a *HUGE* win. :) Now that I’ve caught the bug, I’m looking forward to filling up my little flash drive with lots and lots of fic. :)
Anyway, now that everything’s posted, I’m definitely happy to have participated. Getting into podfic this year has been really rewarding for me, and as someone who’s only ever been a consumer of fanfic/vids/art/etc., it is *so* exciting to have an outlet that is both a creative experience for me and a way to hold up some of my favorite stories and say “Hey! This is awesome! Check it out!” I’m very much looking forward to the other projects that are being discussed in the community for more reccing, more feedbacking, etc. Should be fun. :)
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BTW, do you have any favorite Mag7 stories that I could see about recording? I've been planning out my recording schedule, and I have a LOT of HUGE, multi-chapter fics that I'm planning to do, a lot of them with pretty intense sexual content. I would love some shorter and lighter ones to break it up and keep it fresh.
I've encountered so many nice Mag7 fans since doing it, and I feel bad that there are so few Mag7 stories out there for them to listen to.
Help a girl out, wouldja?
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As for suggestions...hrrrmmmmm... where to begin. ^_^
Here are a handful that pop to mind, no particular order. Most of them are short or mid-length, on the lighter side, and/or seem like they'd be fun to read.
Six Days in San Francisco (http://www.blackraptor.net/m7fic-40/sixdays.htm) - Non Sequitur
All the Reasons Why (http://blackraptor.net/m7fic8/reasons1.htm) - Gloria M. Atwater
An Exercise in Deception (http://quietcontrary.livejournal.com/121259.html) -
Turkey Lurkey (http://www.nottasha.com/turkey.htm) - NotTasha
In the Garden (http://tnf.slashcity.org/viewstory.php?sid=232) - Farad / Charlotte Hill (Vin/Ezra slash)
Ghost Town (http://www.blackraptor.net/m7fic-46/ghosttown.htm) -
If you'd like more to choose from, I have some other favorites bookmarked on delicious (http://delicious.com/NikoRecs/), and you can't really go wrong with anything recommended at the Death Dogs site (http://www.deathdogs.net/mag7.html).
Not that we're likely to overlap, but for the record, I currently have queued up Cold Hard Cash (J. Brooks) and Strange Bedfellows (jojosimco).
I'll be looking forward to seeing what stories you choose to work on! :)
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It's all read as of now, just slogging through the editing process at this point. :)
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I keep thinking I ought to go around and friend a bunch of y'all from Mag7 comms to be social, since I love this fandom so much, but I keep not getting around to it. :)
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