I’ve been thinking about discussing reading aloud for a while now and John Joseph Adam’s recent post about Harry, Carrie and Garp brought it to mind again. I know it seems like reading aloud ought to be self-explanatory, but I’ve heard a lot of authors who should not be allowed to read their own [...]

The human voice is very flexible and we’ll look at the ways you can manipulate it. Remember though, that the voice uses muscle and you can strain it just as easily as an ankle. Pay attention and stop if anything hurts.
Your basic tools are Pitch, Placement, Pacing, Accent and Attitude.
Pitch is fairly self-explanatory. To check [...]

Narrating is at once the easiest part of reading aloud and the hardest. It is the easiest because you don’t have to worry about character voice or distinction–or do you?
You do. That’s why it’s one of the hardest parts. The narrator is a character in your story and is the one that needs to connect [...]

Cross-gender voices are a tricky business. Even if you can really do a convincing cross-gender voice–and I know folks who can–the fact is that in a live reading, people know there’s one person doing all the voices. There are two ways cross-gender voices can throw people out of listening. It’s really bad, and embarrassing, or [...]

First of all, know that not all microphones are created equal. There is a huge, I mean, huge range in what they are designed to do. There are some basic things that you can do to enhance performance in a recording though.
Syllabants and plosives.
An “s” is a syllabant sound. Plosives are any sound, like a [...]

I forgot to mention a couple of my favorite tricks, which work nicely with a microphone. If you drop your volume and lean into the microphone then it will sound as if you are right next to the listener, whispering in their ear. This can have a wonderful effect to distinguish between “asides” and dialogue. [...]

In puppetry we say that breathe carries the emotion. The only time a person notices another person breathing is when it’s important, when it’s carrying information. The simplest example is what happens when you look at someone lying down. You automatically notice if they are breathing, to make certain they aren’t dead.
But [...]

Vocal fatigue is something you’ll have to battle when you’re doing a book signing or working a convention. The voice is created by a set of muscles and it can wear out. There are a lot of things you can do to keep it in good working order, and a lot of things you can [...]

Maggie asked:
What do you do when you make a mistake, or cough, or have to clear your throat, or take a drink of water?
I know that a person can take a break when recording a reading, and one can take a drink then. I also recall readers for the talking books for the blind making [...]

You’ve honed your voice to be a well-modulated wonder. Now you have to get in front of people and actually read. In some readings, the author remains seated. Some, they stand. What should you do?
Well, it depends on venue, the story and your own preference. If you’re in a small [...]

Okay. At some point, every SF story on the planet is going to hit some handwavium. You know the thing I’m talking about, that magic point where you just have to make stuff up in order to cover the gap between what is possible and what you think might be possible sometime in [...]

The tricky thing with reading a story written in the first person is that your narration has the same voice as your main character’s dialogue. There is a simple trick for differentiating when your POV character is narrating and when she is addressing someone else.
For the narration, think, “I am having an [...]

As noted last week, I’m not going to post this week. Now, I asked you to record a story yourself. If you did and would like comments on it, paste a link into the comments of this post.
Meanwhile, I’d like to offer you The Time Traveler Show #9 Halloween Special, which has an [...]

I have a mild cold that I picked up from the germ factories that come aboard the boat to meet the Cinnamon Bear. It’s not bad, just a scratchy throat and fatigue–although I suppose the fatigue comes from other sources. Anyway, we carol as people are boarding. I enjoy this even though [...]

Early on, I talked about the importance of selecting the right piece for a reading. Some pieces of fiction naturally lend themselves to being read aloud, while others are meant to stay on the page.
In John Scalzi’s The Sagan Diary, I ran smack into that difference. Scalzi asked me to read the preface, [...]

When Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press asked me to read Kage Baker’s Rude Mechanicals, I was delighted, because I love the Company stories. I was delighted until I started reading the manuscript and realized that the point of view character was male. I skimmed forward, just looking at dialogue. Most of the [...]

I read Wax, the second standalone story/chapter in the mosaic novel New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear for Subterranean. They’ve just posted the audio files at Subterranean Online
Abigail Irene Garrett drinks too much. She makes scandalous liaisons with inappropriate men, and if in her youth she was a famous beauty, now she is both formidable–and [...]

Please go listen to this brilliant and funny bit of advice: How Not To Do A Podcast by Kate Baker.

I collect etiquette books, so if you ever need to know what kind of gloves to wear to an afternoon wedding in 1851 or the proper way to say goodbye to a guest in 1907, come to me. One of the prizes in my collection is The Jolly Book of Funcraft by Patten Beard [...]

Last week I spent an enjoyable hour being interviewedby Susan Marie Groppi for Strange Horizons‘ podcast. Susan was my editor for “Bound Man,” in Twenty Epics and also “Portrait of Ari” for Strange Horizons.
In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Susan Marie Groppi spoke with Mary Robinette Kowal. Mary is a puppeteer [...]

I often listen to Escape Pod as I’m working, but it goes in fits and starts depending on if I’m working on language based things or not. Lately, I’ve had a lot of work that doesn’t use the verbal part of my brain and the short fiction at Escape Pod is perfect. I’ve [...]

PRX now has “The Confessions of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” by the Willamette Radio Workshop. I perform in this as various cast members and at about the 2:30 mark, you get to hear my b-movie scream. (Now, you do have to register for PRX to listen to this, but it’s a pretty [...]

My niece gave me a cold for Christmas, so we’re going to take advantage of it to show some tricks for dealing with throat ailments. For kicks, I recorded the whole post this time. You can listen to it here OR you can read and just listen to the example clips.
[audio:readingaloudsick.mp3]
You’ve probably noticed [...]

Last night, to celebrate, I worked. I needed to turn in my recording for PodCastle and had been given an extension because of my cold last week. The dragon lady was not appropriate for this story. Even so, my voice was a little fragile and we had to stop a lot.
Actually, that’s [...]

[ July 24, 2008; 7:00 pm; ] I’ll be joining M.M. DeVoe and Matt McHugh as we read stories from The First Line at KGB

Celebrating its 10-year anniversary, the literary magazine “The First Line” — where all stories in an issue begin with same opening line — presents an evening with some of its favorite writers. Three authors will read select [...]

This month, Clarkesworld magazine is offering my story, “Clockwork Chickadee,” as one of their two fiction offerings. Plus, “The Secret in the House of Smiles” by Paul Jessup, and non-fiction by Ekaterina Sedia, Jeff VanderMeer and Neil Clarke.
The teaser:
The clockwork chickadee was not as pretty as the nightingale. But she did not mind. She pecked [...]

If anyone has time, I could use help with two tasks.
1) I recorded a story (not mine and I promise it’s good) and I need to listen to it to make sure that we didn’t leave any of my stumbles in it. I’m tuning out my own voice. The story is two [...]

Cory Doctorow just received the Locus Award for his novella “After the Siege”.
By lucky chance, Subterranean Press had asked me to record “After the Siege” for them. They’ve just put it up live on their website.
Congratulations, Cory! It was a pleasure to read.

[ July 17, 2008 to July 20, 2008. ] .
.
Friday 12:00 Noon
Vinyard: Kaffeeklatsch
Mary Robinette Kowal and Barry B. Longyear
This is my first kaffeeklatsch. Here’s your chance to ask me questions about writing, puppets, SFWA, Iceland… Come chat with me!

Friday 1:00 PM
VT: Tabula Rasa Group Reading
Readings by members of the New York-based Tabula Rasa writer’s group, including Saladin Ahmed, Christopher [...]

Today was one of those odd days where I was occupied all day but got nothing done. I hate those days.  Oh wait. I did laundry and a little bit of story editing.
Then this evening I went to KGB. The readings tonight by John Kessel and Joselle Vanderhooft were both quite enjoyable.  And they’ve both [...]

If you’ve got nothing else going on, swing down to the KGB bar at 85 E. 4th Street at 7:00 tonight to hear short stories read by Matt McHugh, M. M. De Voe and me.
Here’s a teaser of the one I’ll be reading tonight, which appears in the new anthology, The Best of [...]

The reading went quite well. We had a full house, which was a relief. I was afraid no one would come and besides our friends, there were even people that we didn’t know there. We sold copies of the anthology!
Matt McHugh and M. M. De Voe were both very good readers and hearing their stories [...]