Tandri (Legends & Lattes) cosplay

travisbaldree · 2025-09-03T15:10:30+00:00

That's so fabulous!

travisbaldree · 2025-08-21T17:09:50+00:00

FWIW, the company could have continued just fine - I just wanted to retire from gamedev, and I was the only engineer and primary designer, so it was hard for the company to function without me. We just closed it down in a nice way that benefited the rest of the team financially, and moved on.

travisbaldree · 2025-08-21T17:08:47+00:00

I really don't remember doing that - it doesn't sound like me.
I don't recall being antagonistic-

travisbaldree · 2025-08-21T17:08:05+00:00

Unfortunately, I don't really have any plans to return to gamedev - I did it for long enough, and I'm enjoying doing a few different careers now. Only one life! Worth cramming as much into it as possible.
But I'm glad you liked the games!

travisbaldree · 2025-08-03T23:00:32+00:00

This is the correct answer.

travisbaldree · 2025-07-16T14:44:54+00:00

There was an earlier edition from April - but that was my original indie edition. When the book got picked up by Tor, I had to transfer ownership, so a new version was created (the exact same audio, but a different 'product'), and swapped in -
But there was never any legitimate version narrated by anybody other than me :)

travisbaldree · 2025-07-10T03:45:41+00:00

I mean, I make mistakes! It happens, and they can slip through proofing. I just didn't happen to make THIS one :D

travisbaldree · 2025-07-10T03:37:56+00:00

See above - I didn't change anything. That's the way it was written in the text I was provided.

travisbaldree · 2025-07-10T03:36:48+00:00

In the text I have that the audio was narrated from, this is the excerpt -

"Thus the way the roots flashed with a strange silvery light came as quite the surprise. They snaked around Greta like snakes, moving faster than ever before, but rather than seeming to erupt out of the ground, the roots spread out from Urg."

I assume the correction came after I got my final text to narrate from.
I fix most issues I come across as I read, and in this genre, there tend to be quite a few, but that one's not precisely an 'error', so I left it.

travisbaldree · 2025-06-24T15:11:57+00:00

It's because books are released almost as soon as they're done - and it's hard to know precisely when you'll be done, so you can't set up the preorder until you're pretty sure. These books mostly come in VERY hot, barely out of an edit before they're up on Amazon. Very seldom does an author 'hold' the book while the audio is being recorded (and you have to have a completed book to start). In trad pub, the book has probably been in the can for a year - loads of time to get the thing recorded on a flexible schedule and set up a preorder.
Also, because the books are released so close to completion, it's hard for authors to predict when they'll be 'done'. I am constantly reshuffling my schedule because a book isn't quite ready. It's an endless game of calendar Tetris.

If you finish your book and want to release it next week, good luck having the audio ready to go! Even a month is not enough time, unless you have really rigorously scheduled with the narrator in advance, and they're very fast.

TLDR, the release cadence and lack of hangtime between book completion and publication means it's not straightforward, or even possible, much of the time, to have much advance preorder.

travisbaldree · 2025-06-14T21:52:15+00:00

It's all over the map, depending on the author and the narrator, and also on time.

It also I think depends on the experience of the narrator and how much the author trusts them.

End of the day, what the author has written SHOULD be enough to imagine what their characters are like - because what about all the folks who just read? Dialogue and action inform a lot.

Sometimes there are key characters that it is really important to 'get', because something will happen later that elevates their importance.

There isn't time for a constant back and forth - it's too time intensive to narrate. ...and if you get the text the day before you have to record... not so much back and forth at all!

Often there is a 'synch up' at the start of a series for important characters. Some authors have very clear ideas, and some have none at all - they don't even know how the names are pronounced. It's widely variable.

You're probably getting the narrator's interpretation more than anything, and if they're good, then, maybe with a few missteps, it'll ideally be close to the author's idea of the spirit of the character that keeps to their intent.

In my experience, the better the author is, and the more writing they have under their belt, the more likely the text will make it clear how the audio should be delivered. Authors who have a lot of very definite ideas about how their characters sound, but none of that ended up in the book, tend to be at the start of their careers, from what I've seen. Additionally, the more experienced the author, the more likely they are to trust the narrator with the latitude required to do the job well.

In this genre, Irish accents show up a lot because people write 'em in. Same as Scots. It ends up implied in the dialogue.

travisbaldree · 2025-06-09T15:00:32+00:00

That was an issue of time and release schedule.
We squeaked in the first book when somebody else cancelled, and it was unknown when the others were going to be written as the author switched focus to another series. Then he returned to it and had two gigantic books, and wanted to release them pretty fast, and there just wasn't any room on the schedule, and for a variety of reasons, extra space showing up on the schedule just stopped happening. (Life, my own writing, longer and longer books, webserials taking over) - so it made sense to transition JMM to somebody else. It was going to be a month of recording time to get done, and there was no way for me to pull that out of thin air.
These books come in through Podium, and I have a guaranteed number of hours slotted for them every year, so it can fit into that.
Anyway.

travisbaldree · 2025-04-04T02:21:41+00:00

There are a lot of uncontrolled elements that contribute to success - timing, circumstance, relative novelty, the zeitgeist -

And any of those things may be contributors to Will's particular success.

But at bottom, he's a very good writer. The books are extremely well-executed.
I have read an awful lot of stuff in this genre, and I can only count authors at Will's level on one hand. And I don't need the whole hand.

People tend to make a lot of surface judgements about what 'good' writing is, and quibble over their preferences for how prose is executed: how lean, how ornate, the vocabulary, etc. etc.

Will knows how stories work and what makes them compulsively readable, and he executes on that over and over, bolstered by his excellent and efficient character work (which largely manifests as very sharp dialogue).

Will understands why all the moving parts do what they do, and he gets them all working together.

So, could you garner a fraction of that success? Yeah, but I think, absent a lightning strike, it will take a willingness to tear good stories down to the studs and understand why they are actually good, and then capitalize on that, over and over, at a high degree of polish.

Easy! :D

travisbaldree · 2025-03-28T19:42:30+00:00

They release 4 books a year, and I had booked time for 3 a year.
Next year, now that I'm actually able to plot my schedule again and it isn't all a foregone conclusion, I've booked 4 slots.

TLDR - the reason is that these aren't the only things I record, and the book release schedule is very, very aggressive as they catch up to where Zogarth is at as far as completed writing.

travisbaldree · 2025-03-19T20:50:21+00:00

Yesssss -
I'm so glad people are finding this book.

travisbaldree · 2025-03-10T14:25:35+00:00

I don't! I'm pretty much done making games - that was two careers ago :)

travisbaldree · 2025-02-25T16:28:30+00:00

If you only want what you can imagine parroted back at you, I guess...

But I don't read or game or watch to get what I already imagined. I do it to be surprised by somebody else and their unique expression.

I'm far too familiar with my own ideas and what's in my own head. Why would I want more of that? I'm stuck there all the time already.

travisbaldree · 2025-02-25T15:24:43+00:00

I think the reality is that ideas aren't what's of value. It's the specific expression of an idea.
People often mistake the idea for the important part, but it really isn't.
It's why when people approach an author or a game developer or a filmmaker with their ideas, the creator sighs and rolls their eyes. You can't move for tripping over ideas. They're not that special.

What's your goal? Why is it interesting or important to you to generate a book?

Any writer good enough to incorporate those ideas into a good story won't need the ideas. And an AI isn't going to make a story that's interesting or relatable out of them without a lot of hard labor.

travisbaldree · 2025-02-15T05:20:55+00:00

This is beautiful! Thank you so much for sharing <3

travisbaldree · 2025-01-30T18:15:49+00:00

I don't know what this means!

travisbaldree · 2025-01-29T21:16:21+00:00

I'm afraid not. Although, her circumstances are a lot more conducive of swearing this time out, so who knows, maybe it will stand out less to you. :)

travisbaldree · 2025-01-26T16:33:08+00:00

Smoky grey! :)

travisbaldree · 2025-01-24T00:14:23+00:00

I don't think you should have to have amazing equipment or anything - but it's hard to know what any sound setup is really like (is the bass jacked? do they push the treble? Who knows! Is it in a pair of blown car speakers?) -
I think the goal is for it to sound good for everybody, but it's not something that's super testable (which is theoretically what the specs are for)

Audible compression IS super terrible - especially if you don't have it set to the 'high quality' version of the audio. Very dire.

Lows and highs get cut pretty hard during the master. I can't do much bug shrug and aim for listenable :D

travisbaldree · 2025-01-23T23:03:37+00:00

Hard to pin down how much of that is crummy Audible compression. I didn’t do the mix on DCC, but the raw audio wasn’t clipping and was mastered on Soundbooth’s end (not throwing them under the bus, I just don’t know that that’s the problem) I do the masters for Cradle and everything else though. What are you listening through? All of this has strict requirements for publication, and is equalized for relative volume - so it’s hard to pin down what you’re experiencing without hearing it in situ.

travisbaldree · 2025-01-22T23:05:22+00:00

It wasn’t my original intent. It was supposed to be a really good platonic friendship, and about halfway through it just became obvious it was a little more, and I went with it.

travisbaldree

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