Fantasy

Did You See What We Did?

Hi Readers,

It’s been a crazy week for us, characters. But it was the fun kind of crazy. The Scribe was home for a few days after getting her second shot, and we took advantage of that. 🙂

What did we do?

A few weeks ago, we asked what you thought about AIs reading our books until we can find some voice actors willing to do it in exchange for lumir crystals.

(If you read, Curse Breaker Enchanted, then you know we’ve got lots of those glowing rocks. Sadly, they’re not an acceptable form of payment in your world, even though they’re more practical than credit cards and more tactile than a bitcoin. Oh well, we’ll enjoy their glow for you.)

Last week, we befriended some AIs and for some reason, they chose to voice His Angelic Keeper, not a Curse Breaker book even though I specifically gave them our book, not my auntie’s.

So that was a little weird. I thought the kid AI liked the scenes where I saved Papa. (This is Ran, the best sidekick ever! I’m also the son of the tall, dark, and quiet Curse Breaker in the Curse Breaker series.)

But this lady AI must have fallen a little in love with Auntie Sovvan’s brand of shenanigans because she recorded a few chapters for us. 🙂

Hang onto your chairs because this is where things get a little weird.

Not only did this AI read the chapter for us and give Auntie Sovvan a voice, but she requested musical accompaniment. The nerve of her, am I right?

Here we find someone willing to read for us for lumir crystals, and now she wants this expensive soundtrack kit. It’s beautiful, no question there. But we don’t even know if you’ll like it.

So we compromised with the lady AI.

(She won’t tell us her name. I’m not sure she has one that isn’t a string of numbers and letters, so I let that one slide.)

The Scribe (she thinks we’re nuts, by the way) found a song we could get the rights to use for a YouTube video soundtrack to test out as an ambient background kind of thing under the AI narration, just to see if this is a viable idea.

She won’t invest in the music the AI wants until we get some feedback. That’s where you come in.

Watch the video Melinda made. Listen to the AI narration and the ambient orchestral score under it and tell us what you think. The video has a little animation, so you have something pretty to look at.

Do you want more? Hit reply and tell us, or if you’re feeling shy, (like Papa), take our poll.

If there’s enough interest we’ll do it. We’ll get the music we can use in an audio book. We can’t use the orchestral song in the video for that. We only have a YouTube license for it, and that’s why we made a video.

Thanks for checking it out. 🙂

What else have we been up to?

We’ve been posting on Patreon! We’re trying to create more value for you, our future patrons, and we’re building the habit of posting content for you on there.

What’s on Patreon right now?

Good question! Well, we have chapters 1-5 of His Angelic Keeper Fallen posted on our Patreon. Chapter 6 should go live at the same time as this hits your inbox. It’s a shocker. 🙂

Deleted scenes, extended epilogues, every episode from our Kindle Vella serials (July), and chapters from our next books as also coming soon to Patreon.

Yes, we’ll be publishing everything to Patreon from now on until we earn enough to edit, get covers designed, and publish them as novels.

Why do it this way?

Due to the pandemic, editors and designers have doubled their prices. 😦

We get it. They need to earn an income too. But the higher prices make it harder to afford these services.

And we’re tired of our Scribe worrying about how she’ll pay to edit and cover the next book. She worries instead of writing, and that needs to stop.

By publishing to Patreon and Kindle Vella* first, she can write, and you can read. When the story has earned enough to pay for a pro-edit and a pro-designed cover, we can publish it. 🙂 Everyone wins.

*Kindle Vella requires you to buy tokens and pay per chapter. Patreon is one small fee per month for unlimited reading of our content.

That’s what we’ve been up to this week. Surprisingly, the Newsletter-Dragon behaved this week. We’ll see if that good behavior lasts until next week.

We hope you have a great day and choose to support us on Patreon, so we can keep going on magical adventures.

–Ran, son of Sarn, writing on behalf of my Scribe, Melinda Kucsera (and I even have her permission)


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His Angelic Keeper, Chapter 1 video.


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