I’ve been sitting on this for awhile but can finally announce the details.
On November 16th, Audible will release METAtropolis: Cascadia. It’s the sequel to METAtropolis, which was nominated for both the Hugo Award and the Audie Award (the top honor in the audiobook industry). The thing that’s interesting about METAtropolis is that it was created specifically for audio, although it went on to be published in printed book form, both by Subterranean Press and Tor.
I’m in the sequel METAtropolis: Cascadia with a story called “Water to Wine.” While I’ve written for audio theater before, this is the first time that I wrote a narrative with the intention of having it read aloud. The fact that this story was created for and is being published only in audio completely changed the way I approached it.
When I began writing, it was in third person, but then I thought about the work that I’ve done as a narrator and how naturally first-person works in audio form, so I went back and rewrote in first-person, trying to keep in mind the things that made stories easier or harder to narrate. Um… which didn’t keep me from having a conversation between four women and one man. (Sorry!)
The whole project was edited by Jay Lake who conceived the idea to focus on just one of the regions that last years METAtropolis covered. So this audio anthology deals with the Pacific Northwest. In fact, you’ll notice that three of the writers are Portland based.
- THE BULL DANCERS by Jay Lake
- WATER TO WINE by Mary Robinette Kowal
- BYWAYS by Tobias S. Buckell
- CONFESSOR by Elizabeth Bear
- DEODAND by Karl Schroeder
- A SYMMETRY OF SERPENTS AND DOVES by Ken Scholes
Here’s the blurb for the anthology:
As the mid-20th Century approaches, the Pacific Northwest has been transformed — politically, economically, and ecologically — into the new reality of Cascadia. Conspiracies and secrets threaten the tenuous threads of society. The End of Days seems nearer than ever. And the legend of the mysterious Tygre Tygre looms large.
Oooh, this is cool. I loved METAtropolis and especially Cascadia. Such a fascinating world that had so much potential. I will be looking forward to this project.
I’ve got a question, how did your past experience recording audio books effect how you approached writing your story? (Or did it?)
It absolutely did affect it. Besides changing the story to 1st person, I also tried to limit the number of characters in a scene to make it easier to distiguish who was speaking. I did have one with five characters in it but otherwise tried to keep it to just two characters at a time.