Battle of Nesma Audiobook Incoming

The Divergent Chill: Battle of Nesma audiobook is set to be released soon. It’s been in production for a long couple of months. I used the ACX platform to produce the book and partnered with an incredibly talented narrator and voice actor, Beau Thomas and Grace Noble. Beau narrates and voices the male characters, and Grace performs the female characters. The book is undergoing final review by ACX as the final step before it goes on sale on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.

Divergent Chill: Battle of Nesma audiobook cover. Coming soon!

I even got the original cover artist from the paperback/Kindle version of Battle of Nesma back to design an updated cover for the audiobook. Jerry Shaffer is better than ever. He’s working on some other designs for me and hopefully we’ll have some character vignettes coming soon.

Battle of Nesma has been out for many years now, but the ability to produce and publish an audiobook version remained out of reach for me until recently. I started looking into the possibility after discussing book publishing with my friend, Chris Scarnati, who just published his best seller, Paul Spadafora: Fighting Till the End. I discovered there were many different services I could use to produce the audiobook, but ACX seemed to be the most straightforward and it was affiliated with Audible and Amazon already. Getting the process started with Battle of Nesma was made so much easier with the ability to kind of “side load” all of the book details.

Divergent Chill: Battle of Nesma for sale on Amazon.

Once I created the book project on ACX with a short excerpt, I immediately started receiving auditions from a slew of talented performers. I was impressed, and it took a lot of back and forth before I decided to go with Beau. From there, a long couple of weeks followed as I worked every night listening to each of Beau’s recorded chapters. I caught his mistakes and I caught many of mine. The review and my discussions with my friend Chris made me aware of the possibility of updating the published books on Amazon to fix these errors. I originally thought this was impossible but learned that so long as corrections do not change the page count by more than 10%, they can be made without having to publish a new version.

I made the fixes, lots of small things like confusing “Alden” and “Olin” a couple of times. I also ran the text through a modern grammar and spelling review in Office and fixed a bunch of stuff. In the end, the page count didn’t change and the book should be much improved.

The audiobook is even more impressive. The narration brings a life to my book beyond what my words were able to do. I’ll share a sample below. It’ll be a slightly extended, draft version of the retail sample and demonstrates Beau’s ability to narrate and voice Beriszl with Grace voicing a young Chilali. I can’t wait to share the final product when it releases!

Follow me on X: @DivergentZen

Update on Writing and Growing Lilies

I’ve been away for a while now managing some personal stuff. In the meantime, I have been jotting down notes for Divergent Chill III, as well as an anime-inspired work that (ironically enough) functions as a prequel to a screenplay I wrote one summer during college.

I’m trying to get back into things, but I know it will take time. There’s certainly a lot material bubbling inside me right now, but I just don’t feel the same spark to sit down and create worlds. Fake it until I make it seems like the only course of action.

All of that aside, I have been productive in my non-writing career and with my hobbies.

Something I got dragged into about a year ago was gardening. A good friend gave me a set of succulents and cacti as a birthday present and I ended up panicking about how to care for them. I purchased one of those cheap plastic greenhouses to keep them and didn’t consider that I had done the equivalent of leave them inside a car in the sun. I cooked virtually all of them except for some elephant grass and another succulent that miraculously survived. The one “Christmas cactus” I had lost the top part of its splice, the colorful bulb, but lived and grew quite a while before the recent frigid temps put it out of its misery.

In an early effort to save these plants, I dug up a 4′ by 4′ square in my backyard, lined it with bricks, and filled it with potting soil. This became my first garden and I hoped to save the plants by transplanting them to it. I didn’t have much success, but the same friend that gave me the plants originally happened to be fond of stargazer lilies and as fate would have it the local Wal-Mart suddenly decided to stock a wide variety of lily bulbs.

Stargazer Lily – The prettiest and best smelling of all lilies.

A few Tiger Lilies from late spring 2017.

That’s how I got hooked. A couple packs of stargazer and tiger lilies have become a mild obsession. Yes, I did plant other things like cayenne pepper, bell peppers, and other flowers, but the lilies were my thing. I doubled the size of my original garden to fit more bulbs and once I improved my garden design method, I set up a circular one in my front yard just for flowers, lilies in particular.

Last spring saw some blooms but not everything did bloom due to late planting and others had their growth stunted by larger, more aggressive plants (goddamn vincas) stealing sunshine. I expect this spring and summer to be much more fruitful as I had to uproot many of those plants after they died to frost.

I’ll include some pics below. I planted roughly 25 new bulbs this season in the front flower garden. I had to order some of these bulbs from Amazon and they arrived all the way from China, surprisingly. They were quite well wrapped and packaged and have already started sprouting after just a couple of weeks.

A package of Stargazer Lily bulbs that arrived from China and seem to be off to a growing start.

Muscadet and Stargazer Lily bulbs delivered from China sprouting from the soil in a couple of weeks.

Continue reading to see a few more pics!

 

Continue reading “Update on Writing and Growing Lilies”

Verified by MonsterInsights