Many Voices

When I saw the topic for this week, the little voices in my head all started fighting for my attention.

"Pick me!" demands Orziel, the half-demon bastard from my first book. He's a pretty demanding, even imperious character for someone who's got no station in life and no power to back up his massive ego. Still he can be pretty persuasive.

"Pick me," he says again, this time purring in my ear as he stands behind me and rubs my shoulders. "I'm your first, and your favorite. When you write me, you get to do such nasty things like seduce pretty boys or scheme against evil empresses. If you pick me, you can spend the rest of the blog post watching me pit my two lovers against each other in an oral sex competition to see who can make the other come first."

That's Orziel all right. Manipulative, sex-obsessed and about as subtle as a 2x4 to the forehead.

"Oh screw this chump," Bernice rasps. She shoves Orziel aside and slides a plate of huevos rancheros in front of me, plus a steaming hot cup of joe. "You know you want to write about a real character, someone who defies all expectations and makes your readers laugh to boot. I'm the character for the job and you know it."

Yes, Bernice definitely is a character. At seventy-two, she's the only woman I know of brave enough to match a leopard print mini-skirt with a Grateful Dead tank top and top the whole deal off with an electric pink faux-hawk. She's also got a kick-ass collection of heavy metal CDs and she can cook like nobody's business.

"Oh please!" The Silver Panther pushes in front of Bernice and stretches to show off the aging but still fine feline physique beneath his silver costume. "Our beloved author is looking for a main character today, not some secondary wanna-be. Pick me, sweet-cheeks, and we'll definitely have some fun. It's been ages since I've tried to blow up Super City, and I'm just dying to talk about my sexual exploits as a super-villain extraordinaire."

Bernice shoves a finger in the Panther's face. "You know pal, I may be a few years older than you, but I'm willing to bet I can prove you don't have nine lives."

"Is that so, Grandma?" The Panther shakes his hips, making the tail on his costume swish back and forth. "Bring it, old lady! I'll chew you up like a cheap cat toy and spit you back up again!"

Orziel sighs and fondles the boy toy he's dug up from somewhere. "Good. While you two work that out, I've got something to show dear Helen. You remember Jarresh, right?" Orziel says to me. The slim redhead on his lap has better hair than I do and far nicer lingerie. "He's got the most amazing mouth, and I just love the way he dances," Orziel purrs. He slips a finger in the waistband of Jarresh's loincloth. "You really were on the ball when you created him."

Jarresh doesn't say anything. He just smiles, blushes, and arches back against Orziel. That pretty little slut knows he's got it good right now. In the next book, I'm going to have to take him down a peg or two.

But first I have to sort things out between Bernice and the Silver Panther before they destroy my office. Assuming I can get to them. The room is starting to get a little crowded now as more and more characters clamber around, each demanding their moment in the spot light. Even Diane Horner, the forty-something mom who's just sitting quietly at my desk searching the internet for gay porn, is making her presence known. Especially when she finds certain pictures of a dark-haired young man doing nasty things in a cheap motel room.

"I'll just leave this up here," she says, vacating my chair so I can sit and write my blog post. "I bookmarked a few sites. You can browse through them while you decide who you really want to write about."

Damn, damn, damn. So many characters, so little time. And so very little office space. They're all pressed up against me now, and not a damn one of them is behaving properly. I guess that's how I know they're good characters. They don't listen to me, the author. They don't do what I want them to do. They've got minds of their own and they take off in whatever direction they want to go, carefully plotted story outlines be damned. With such a cast of strong-willed individuals, how can I pick just one to be my favorite?

"Excuse," I hear a soft voice say, "I know you're busy right now, but could you do something for me? This stupid costume doesn't fit right and I've got a party to go to, remember?"

I look over and see Dana standing at the window, dressed in the badly fitted French maid's outfit I put him in last night. At least I think his name is Dana. Whether or not Dana is a 'he' sort of depends on the time of day and Dana's mood. He... she... fusses with the cheap costume, pulling at the baggy top that's meant to be filled with breasts he/she (ze?) doesn't have. Meanwhile, a tall lanky character that's just as hard to pin down and still doesn't have a name yet is standing in the corner watching Dana struggle with his/her (zer?) outfit.

"I can fix that for you," the unknown says, eyes unreadable behind mirrored sunglasses.

Dana huffs and adjusts the skirt. "I don't even know you yet."

"You will," the unknown character responds. "Pretty soon, you and I are going to get to know each other very, very well."

Dana blushes and turns away, but I see his/her/zer eyes slide back to the unknown character in the corner. Suddenly I know who I want to write about - the unknown, unfinished characters with plans all their own, the ones yet to be fully discovered.

I sit down at my keyboard and begin to type.

Let Me Whisper In Your Ear

by Helen E. H. Madden

Digital vs. traditional. What a discussion! I've always considered my writing career one giant experiment, so it should be no surprise that I'm quite happy being e-published. I've even taken to reading e-books myself (yes, really!) now that I have a decent device to read them on. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction to have a library of books on my little Asus EEE netbook. But the net book wasn't my first means of getting my fiction fix digitally, nor were e-books my only means of getting electronically published.

A few years ago, at a science fiction convention not too far from my home, I attended a workshop on podcasting. I had no clue about what podcasting was, only that it had something to do with iPods. This particular workshop was billed as a must for writer interested in promoting their work. Since I was a new writer who had just signed a contract for my first e-book, I decided to look into it. That's where I met Tee Morris, the godfather of podcasting.

Tee is one of many authors, and I believe the first, to create an audio recording of one of his book and post it to the internet for free. He has not been the last, not by a long shot. That weekend, I sat through several hours, listening to Tee and Rich Sigfrit and others talk about the benefits of creating free these free audio recordings and giving them away. I got my degree in broadcast journalism, so it wasn't hard to convince me. that this was somethng I wanted to try. All I would need was a USB mic, some audio recording and editing software (which I could get for free), enough space on my hard drive to store my recordings, and a website to post my work.

Oh, and I needed a topic.

Yeah, that last part was tricky. I was all a-buzz with the want, the need, to get my work out there on the intertubes, but I had no idea what to say. The one thing Tee Morris had emphasized over and over again in his workshop was the need for good content. A podcaster could get away with an okay technical set up, so long as what they recorded would grab the audience's attention.

In search of ideas, I bought a tiny little iPod and downloaded a bunch of other people's podcasts. I listened to fiction and non-fiction, full length books and short stories. There was Tee Morris' Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword, Scott Sigler's Ancestor, Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing, Danni Cutler's Truth Seekers, and dozens of others. Pretty soon, I was getting my geek fix with Escape Pod, Psuedo Pod, and then Podcastle, all podcast magazines of short genre fiction. There was even an erotica author out there, Nobilis Reed of the Nobilis Erotica Podcast. I was in heaven, listening to all these stories while I exercised and cleaned house, taking them with me anywhere I wanted to go.

But I still didn't know what **I** wanted to podcast myself. I was getting desperate. I so wanted to get out there on the net and have my own show. The amazing ability to whisper my thoughts, my stories, my ideas, into people's ears seemed like such power ot me. The answer of what to record finally came to me while listening to Jared Axelrod's Aliens You Will Meet. This was my favorite podcast of them all. It was simply a very short spiel told by a computerized assistant to a galactic ambassador, detailing the aliens he would meet that day. It sounds strange. It's hysterically funny. As a story telling device, it's brilliant. Imagine what your day-planner would say to you if it could talk!

But the thing about it was, it was short, really short. I suddenly had the idea that perhaps I could write a series of flash ficiton pieces and record them. Writing flash fiction made sense. I had a tight schedule. Any new project I took on couldn't take up too much time. So I made a plan to write twenty or so pieces of flash fiction, to see how that would fit into my schedule. I would write the stories first before recording a single line, to give myself plenty of lead time on the techincal aspect of things. I knew it would be important to keep up with regular output. Once I got started, I'd have to keep going to build an audience, and that meant writing in well in advance of recording and producing and posting my work. What I didn't know, didn't count on, was that I would fall in love with what I was doing right off the bat.

I wrote my first piece of flash fiction for the podcast, a horror piece that I submitted to the storytime group at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association. No sooner was it done than I was suddenly inspired to write a whole series of horror stories. "That's it!" I thought to myself. "I'll start in October, with a monthly theme of horror stories. Then in Novemember I can write about feasts. For December, I can write about gifts..."

It was already the first week of September. My plans to write 20 stories in advance went straight out the window. I spent the rest of that month knocking out four more horror erotica stories, buying a mic, setting up audio software and getting an RSS feed for my show. I mixed my own music from some free sound loops I had, and over that in as sexy a voice as I could muster, I recorded the following:

Warning, this podcast contains sexually explicit material, and is only intended for listeners ages 18 and older...

In the background, you could hear what sounded like the engine of a space ship revving up. Then the bomb sirens kicked in, along with the music, and "Welcome to Heat Flash..."

Heat Flash, the intense burst of heat that accompanies a nuclear explosion. Also, short erotic fiction available in audio format every week. That was my show. And it all started two years ago. Since then, I've written, recorded and produced over 100 stories for the Heat Flash Erotica Podcast. It's science fiction, fantasy, and horror erotica, the stuff I love the most. It's also completely free to anyone who wants to listen. I don't make any money off of it, at least not directly. I do think it keeps me out of the slush pile when I submit for anthologies, and it goes a long way toward promoting me and the other projects I work on. Last winter, I was picked up by Radio Dentata for part of their erotic story time line up on Thursday evenings. Again, still no pay, but you know what? I don't care. I'm addicted to the format. Each week, I can't wait to sit down and read my stories into the mic. I can't wait to mix those recordings together with some music and then send it out to whole wide world. I've had over 40,000 downloads of my show in the last 2 years. That's a lot of ears to whisper into. And I'm no longer the no-name writer with a handful of publishing credits to her name.

I'm a podcasting star, baby. And you could be one too. All it takes is a USB microphone, some free audio editing software, a little hard drive space and a website with an RSS feed.

Oh, and content. Something you want to record, something you desperately need to share with the rest of the world, to whisper into eveyrone's ear. That's the hard part, but it's also the best part.