D. Scott Allen Goes Skyborne with The Aerie Protocol

Scott Allen has spent years voicing other people’s stories — grimdark warriors, space captains, assassins, at least one traumatized wizard — and now he’s finally thrown his own brain into the ring with The Aerie Protocol. So he's excited to join Mookie Spitz to talk about his flight from audiobook narrator to author, and how one stubborn sci-fi idea refused to leave him alone for years: What if there were hidden cities floating above the clouds… and humanity never noticed?

What starts as a conversation about speculative fiction quickly mutates into a full-blown discussion about creativity, self-doubt, AI, storytelling, audiobook disasters, and why every indie creator is basically juggling chainsaws while pretending they have a business plan. Scott breaks down the emotional core of The Aerie Protocol: a war photographer who realizes he’s spent his entire life hiding behind the lens instead of actually participating in the world. Mookie, naturally, turns this into a philosophical rant about identity, passivity, modern life, and why some people document existence while others decide to kick the damn door open and live.

The two also go deep into the absolute chaos of audiobook production. Failed multi-cast experiments. Voice actors who can’t sync emotionally. Audio levels from hell. AI narration that sounds like a sedated GPS app reading your grocery list. Scott explains why human performance still matters, why reading prose out loud exposes weak writing instantly, and why narrating your own novel is psychologically brutal when you’ve spent years safely performing other people’s work instead of exposing your own.

The two also let loose a ton of real-world creative shop talk: beta readers, editing, balancing day jobs with art, talking story ideas into your phone like a lunatic at stoplights, and the modern reality that writers are now expected to also be marketers, podcasters, editors, social media goblins, and algorithm whisperers simultaneously.

Give them a listen if you love science fiction, audiobooks, storytelling, creativity, or listening to two guys enthusiastically spiral into existential discussions about art and technology while occasionally bullying each other into finishing projects. And yes — Mookie repeatedly pressures Scott to stop overthinking things and record the damn audiobook already. Because if a professional narrator won’t narrate his own sci-fi novel, civilization may already be toast.

The Guest

Storytelling has always been part of my life, even if it hasn’t always been on the page. Over the years, I’ve written short stories and explored ideas quietly, while building a career in voiceover and audiobook narration. Bringing other people’s stories to life gave me a deeper understanding of what makes a story connect.  Now, I’m stepping into a new role as an author, sharing my own work and continuing that lifelong connection to storytelling in a new way. I hope you enjoy the work.

His New Novel

His Prior Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz, and I'm thrilled to have Mr. Scott Allen in the factory with me today. Welcome, Scott. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. That voice, that sound, I know you as the audiobook guy. You are an epic voiceover narrator. We met through Ingrid Moon. She did the novella BioHunter. And you were both on the podcast. And I put in clips and I've listened to your stuff. Kudos to you as the consummate, consummate vo guy. And now you're entering the realm of authorship. You are now at the very least a double threat. You were you were a single threat and now you're a double threat. So welcome to the party, pal.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Thank you so much. We'll we'll know if I'm a double threat after some reviews come in.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

You don't worry about it. It's uh a friend of mine said, if you write, you're published, which means you have put pen to paper, finger to keyboard, you've completed a novel, I've checked it out, and I think it's it's terrific. And I think you're you you are an author, sir, regardless of the uh paparazzi, right? Yes, yes, but of course, I I'm I'm confident you'll get some great reviews with this. The book is called The Airy Protocol, and I don't want to give away too many spoilers, and I want to let the author himself describe the the plot and themes, but what I got out of it is uh is a take on on climate, is a take on self-actualization, where the character realizes that he can't hide behind the persona of his career and needs to do stuff and become part of the world, and in becoming part of the world, he becomes more of his true self. Do I more or less get the the there it is, yeah. Basically, yeah, all right. What inspired you to A take pen to paper after being you know the mic guy? Yeah, and B, what about this theme? Where did where did this come from?

SPEAKER_01 2:23

This is like this is like varied career number nine or something, I think. Um man, I I've done so many things over my life, but one of the things I've always done is I've always scribbled down ideas for stories. Or back in like literally like 1994, I wrote a series of short stories and a little anthology book that I thought I might one day publish that's been sitting on my hard drive of various computers, you know, untouched forever. Uh, and then uh one of the ideas was what turned into this story. And um just it's this one stuck with me the most because I I had this idea, and honestly, it was about the first time I got in an airplane and I was flying through the clouds, and this thing came to me about what if there was a city up here, right? What if we what if we we saw this glint of steel or glass or something, and there were just people floating above the earth in these hidden cities we never knew about? Uh, and it was nothing more than that for years because I couldn't figure out how I wanted to work it. And I kept jotting down different ideas and different ideas, and then finally in the last few years, with just sort of the climate change discussion and the things that have happened, I started thinking like, what if all of this is not caused by climate change, but caused by something unknown to us, right? And so it just became this idea uh for this book that I finally said, let's take this short story idea, turn it into something different. Completely went a different route with some of the characters that I had originally envisioned. Uh uh, because at first I was thinking about having these two sort of maybe teenage-y kind of kids that were traversing the atmosphere and somehow ending up getting caught on Earth and have to figure out how to get away with people not knowing who they were, right? Stuff like that. Prequel. Uh, but anyway. So I just kind of changed everything up. I came up with this idea. I came up with the idea watching the news or something of the guy, the main character being a photographer, someone who was always behind the view of the lens, but never really got involved, and took it to that next level of like, never got involved. Took photos of people getting shot or killed or maimed in war and just literally being the guy behind the camera. And this is the first time he makes the decision to like, if I don't get involved, things could go really bad south. I'm gonna do this new thing, right? So, uh, and it just progresses from there. I mean, it uh it just became a thing that uh just started to flow as I started to pour it out onto the old you know, keyboard and computer.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Science fiction as a genre loves the counterfactual conditional, the what if, right? And then the best ideas come with that, you know, what if. Yeah, and sound sounds like you had the what if of this Sky City, what if right this photographer actually starts to take control of his own life and take accountability and turn a passive professional existence into an active humanistic one, and you put him into a circumstance where he finally has a chance to do exactly that, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Well, and and uh you know, and like I said, I've been in a sort of an arid jotter downer of thought. I won't call myself a writer, so to speak, in in in form, but as I was writing, I was like, what would make it more interesting, right? Is there uh is there the villainous character, right? What's the antagonist, protagonist thing? Is it, I mean, he finds this city and he, you know, what happens? Like, why is he there? So just as I started putting more down and thinking about it, I new characters kind of came to mind. And, you know, some got uh left on the cutting room floor, so to speak, and others are in the book, you know. So um, and I also, you know, I didn't I don't know anything about time frame or length, or you know, I was like, is this gonna be a novella? Is this a book? Is this uh I don't know. So I just let it kind of go until it was done.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

That's the best way to do it. Uh a national sympathetic journalist asked Abraham Lincoln how long a president's legs should be, because he was tall and lank, he probably suffered from Marfon syndrome. And uh and and good old Abe, in his usual wit, responded instantly, long enough to reach the ground.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Oh, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

So I think as a writer, that's bang on point, which is how much can you really plan, especially when the dramatic arc of the thing emerges out of the characters being thrown into this world that you've created?

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Right. Right. Yeah. So I mean that's just kind of what happened. It just went from being this, you know, sort of few jots of a short story from some years ago to why not do something with it? It just kept coming back to me. And it's the first of there's probably of the 15 or so stories I wrote down, there's a good five, six, seven that I'm like, hmm, if I can do it with this one, let's see what happens. So, you know, I am already thinking about another version of this. I mean, not version, but actually the prequel of this book, as well as another story I've really enjoyed for years in my brain. And I'm like, well, I might as well share it with other people. So, you know, we'll see how it goes.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Excellent, be all you can be. And in the immortal words of Sam Spade of the Maltese Falcon, why not? Yeah, right. Go for it. I mean, you're a creative person. While I'm reading your prose, I heard your voice because you have a very distinctive voice, and I and I did notice a heightened sensitivity to flow and to pronunciation. Honestly, yeah, it it's it's melefuel melefluous, is that how you say it? Where it it's got a nice rhythm to it, and I'm wondering, did you actually read it out loud to yourself? Did you have the voice in your head as you wrote? You've done so much audiobook narration of other people's stuff. Now it's your stuff, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Well, and that's the thing, you know, is that I have done a good number of audiobooks. I I I love taking other people's stories and turning them into characters and narration and giving them as much depth as I can. And then as I started to read my own book out loud, uh, you know, at first I was like, yikes, what have I done? And then that's what also forced me to sort of go through and refine. Um, I'm an impatient person too. So I had a conversation even with Ingrid, you know, because she's like, What do you mean you wrote a book? I'm like, I don't know, it's just a thing. Uh, and she started telling me about all these things I should do and line edit this and that. And I was like, I don't have the patience for this, I'm doing it myself.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

So 100%. That's my ongoing uh sparring with her. Ingrid is the most buttoned-up writer I know. She does rigorous beta reading testing. Yeah, she takes in the feedback of her fans. You know, from chapter 18 to 19, I got a little lost there, Ingrid. Can you clarify that? And she'll she'll leap on her keyboard and and she'll make it happen. Her covers are gorgeous. She's she just she does everything the the right way. Yeah, and and I do everything the wrong way, which is like, uh, this is a cool idea. I'm just going for it.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

I'm hoping I'm a happy medium. I did do a beta reader thing with a few people I know that I trust that I know they like sci-fi or you know, friends or a few family members. My dad is an avid reader and he loves sci-fi, so he was the first person I sent it off to. And he was like, there's there at that time, he was like, There's a lot of descriptive stuff going on in here. But when I got through it, the point is I didn't stop reading it. I couldn't put it down, the story was good, right? So I knew I was on the right path. I just had to go in and update it and get it, get rid of some prose and change it around a bit uh to make sure that it made more sense. So after having about five different people give me some feedback, I really just dove in in a period of like a week and a half and re-edited uh a huge amount of the book until I felt it was and then reading it out loud at that point, like you mentioned, I was like, oh, now I can actually read it out loud and not get all tongue-twisted in my own, you know, verbiage, because sometimes that's the hardest part about narrating anything. And if you can't read it out loud, you can't read it in your head.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

So that's an old Einstein thing, that if you can't articulate a thought in one or two clear sentences, then it's most certainly wrong. And from the point of a writer, if you can't read it out loud in a clear, concise way that's instantly comprehensible, then you should probably rewrite it.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's that's that's that's what ended up happening in a few places where it was just like, okay, I've got some tongue twisters in here, you know.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

So I'm learning a little bit. I'm doing a spin-off prequel of my big science fiction novel, and I sent the first three chapters and a plot summary to 20 people writers, publishers, even an illustrator, and I got about 20 different takes on it. Oh wow. So so, in ways, I'm kind of like, yeah, you know, it's everyone's got an opinion, as they say, but I did learn some important stuff. And if you are an indie writer, even an illustrator, any anyone involved as a creative, getting feedback can't hurt.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Throw it out there and see what people take it for what it's worth based on the people you sent it to as well, right? Exactly. I know some of my friends are totally retentive about certain things and that they're gonna be like, I don't like this, you know, but that's okay. What I wanted is at the end of the day, what was their final thought? And all of them came back with, This is a really good story, I really enjoyed it. So now it was just about fine-tuning it to make myself happy as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Absolutely. And at the end of that proverbial author's day, that's that's criteria number one. Whether a million people read it or five, whether you're the next Andy Weir or not, right? There's there's intrinsic satisfaction in in writing your own story and getting it out there for sure. Regarding your your voiceover work, how do you balance the different parts of your of your creativity? Because now you're you're it's kind of you you were you started in rhythm guitar and now you're going in the lead. And was there any kind of short circuiting or disconnect? Is there an imposter syndrome that you were grappling with going into this? And actually, you know how does it feel to now be that double thread?

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Well, well, you know, actually the thing that was probably the most difficult about the process occurring uh recently is that I I was just finishing up a three-book series of a little crime thriller audiobook that I did. And then I actually don't tell anyone, but I'm working on Ingrid's final book. Uh, so I'm in the middle of, you know, I'm recording right now, and then to be recording someone else's work and then writing your own and then keeping it all sort of separated in your noggin, you know, that that at some points I was like, I am just gonna have to step away for right now, you know, because you start to get caught up in I don't want to sound like I don't want my writing to come off as somebody else's because I'm doing their work right now, you know. But I think I'm pretty good at being able to separate that out pretty quickly. I have a pretty good separation in my brain of like when I'm reading something, I can kind of say, give me 10 minutes and now I'll focus on just this, you know. So it turned out to be okay for all the things, because otherwise I was like, what am I gonna do? Sequester myself for six months in a cabin in the woods somewhere, like in the movies.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Yeah, we're all grappling with that balance between compartmentalization and being overwhelmed with too much stimuli. And yeah, you need input for the output, but it could be overwhelming. And sometimes even the modalities Chris and cross, where you publish and then you repurpose, and then you tweet it, and then you do a video, and then you sell your book in person, and then you're barking it online, and then you've got your website, and then you got your side hustle, and then you got your day job, and woohoo.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

Yeah, no, for sure. It's it's all and it's all of those things, right? It's it's everything that is all in one place, but it's like if the if the creative thought weren't strong enough to want to put it down on paper, so to speak, you know, I could have just stopped and it could have sat there for another 10 years uh as notes from the original book. Um, but it just kept, I just couldn't let it go. I just every time I I I would fly, especially for this book, I was like, dang it, that cloud city thing is just really, you know, how do I make that happen? And so finally I just said we're gonna do it.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Um, so that's the itch you finally scratched. And I think we're all we're all better for it. Now I'm gonna ask you the the dumb question and the obvious one, and I'm sure everyone's wondering, who's gonna do the audiobook?

unknown 16:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

I I already told a couple of my friends and I told about it. I said, Hey, I got this book coming out, and they're like, Are you gonna do an audiobook? I said, Not until I get reviews. I want, yeah, I'm not I'm not on my it I uh I I will probably do my own audiobook, but I am I want to make sure that I feel like people are enjoying the book because to me, um, doing an audiobook just to do an audiobook isn't really a thing. You know what I mean? I I I know that I have done them for people before and I've charged them a reasonable rate for the amount of time it takes me to do it. And then if it doesn't sell or I don't see it selling, I feel so bad. Uh A for them, but B, I'm kind of like, okay, that if it made you feel better, I mean, I guess that's great to have it, but I always think the story should be so enticing that people really want to hear the audiobook, you know.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Modality does make a difference. A lot of folks just won't buy a book because they only listen and they even call it that this is now a term, yeah, and it's kind of humorous, but they read audiobooks, they use the verb read an audiobook.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

I have a friend who tells me, like, I read 16 books last month. I'm like, what? No, you did it in the car. I'm like, uh, I got it.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

You know, I love that. I think it's it's adapting the language and it's recalibrating how we consume content.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

You're gonna make me do more work. You're gonna make me have to do it.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

That's true, but at the same time, you've got a huge target audience who would embrace the airy protocol immediately if you make it available in that format, who otherwise might not be exposed to your great story because it's alphanumeric. They they don't have the time, they they don't put that into their day. Yeah, that is true. So sounds to me I'm gonna do it if if I can see the money.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

It's not even it is more about wanting to make sure that that I think people are enjoying it. You know, there's that again, it's it's my first time doing this, and there's that nervousness of what if it sucks? Um, and so even though I had some beta readers come out and read it and tell me they enjoyed it, etc., it's just that it's the first time putting this kind of a thing out there into the universe that's my work, you know. So it's a lot more personal than audiobooks. I didn't write them, but I know I do the work, I know I bring them to life, I know I take the time to help develop those characters, but they're already pre-written, right? So there's there's only a finite amount of work I can do to the story. This is just mine.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Sounds to me like you also have the safety of the prosemium arch in ways, which is it's another person's content and you're performing it. Yeah, so if the screenplay or the play is is it could be all that, you're not being judged per se on the pure content, you're delivering a performance. And for the first time in your career, these worlds are crossing over. Yeah. Where if they're gonna judge you, it's not only on the quality of your voicing, but it's on the content itself, and that's a double, that's a double. It's like you're naked twice. Yeah, it's like come come and judge me for my my my audio, and while you're at it, judge me for my book, too. That's kind of it. Yeah, well, I I I get it, I get it. As as as just the bald guy on the other side of the screen here, I would I would only suggest that A, I I I read the thing and it's good. B, you're terrific in terms of doing your voiceovers. That's self-evident because you've had a legit successful career for some time doing it. How many books have you have you voiced so far?

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Yeah, it it's it's not as many as I would love to have say I could, but I know that because I'm very picky about the things that I like to to do, and I only really got into it about maybe seven, eight years ago, full time. So I think I've done about 30, 30 books. I've done some multicast stuff uh where I'm you know play a couple of characters or two, three, four characters in a book, but not narrate it. Um, then I've done the full-on narration, and then like the last one I did with Ingrid, the Bio Hunter, which was very fun. You know, I narrated and did some of the characters, but then I also produced and edited and put together the other actors into the book. So that was the first time I had done the sort of the full multicast production side, uh, which was an interesting uh, you know, I'd do it again, but I definitely do it differently. So, you know, fun.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Ladies and gentlemen, viewers and listeners, I'll put a link to that podcast where I actually had Ingrid and you on, and you guys talked about process. That was uh a terrific conversation for this book. Let's say hypothetically, you got the five-star reviews, you get some press, people like it, your confidence builds in terms of the the talent that you bring and the results that you bear for your airy protocol. How would you approach the audio? Would you do a multi-voice catchwork like you did for BioHunter? What would you do with it just hypothetically?

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Yeah, that's actually that's something I had given a little bit of thought, even though I've kind of been like, not yet, um, to decide would I want to hear other voices in it besides my own? You know, again, knowing that it's my own work. I the books that I've done, I do. Male, female voices all the time without, you know, making it all sound like Monty Python. And so, but then it's a matter of like, would it lend more though to have true female voices where needed, right? Or other men's voices for some characters that might lead a little more um um emphasis to the character or give maybe a different taste that I may not have thought of. You know, it's always interesting to have somebody else read your work out loud or whatever and come back and tell you how they uh saw a character, how they heard a character in their own head. Uh so I I don't know for sure. Um I would probably initially think I would just do it myself, but it isn't beyond my saying, you know what, actually, let's let's revamp this and go like multicast, you know. Or that new thing a lot of people are doing is also the the two-character duet kind of thing where there's two main characters that kind of read. It's not that it's written that way, but then there's always that possibility of how might you do something along those lines, you know.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

I was presumptuous enough to try to do the audio of my book, and you and I talked about that. Yes, I remember, yeah. And the first iteration, I did it in sections, and I actually usurped one of my podcast shows, the no hair all heart show. And then I had this serialized episodes of me doing the audio book of my own book. Very good. And I got I got about halfway through it, so it was pretty pretty good, and I got a pretty good response again. They know I'm I'm amateur VO guy, yeah. But but it was fun, and then the light bulb went off. You know, this is great. I'm gonna recruit friends and family for each voice, and I'm gonna just edit. I'm gonna go on Da Vinci and I'm just gonna edit all this an absolute cataclysmic disaster scheduling people, getting people to participate, getting the vo the sound levels right. Yeah, it was a hashtag epic fail. It just did not work, and you can appreciate that. You're a professional, and you must get this a lot. It's like people playing Doctor all the time. Yeah, that's easy. I can do it, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:14

100%. Yeah, you hear that. And even on the books where I have been involved in multicast recording, uh, the the uh um production house that I've worked with about six, seven different times now, even them, you know, they reach out to everybody and say, uh give us your schedules, then they've got to put all the schedules together. And sometimes I end up having to record at like 6:30 a.m. my time, or you know, 8:30 p.m. my time because people are in East Coast or whatever, you know, schedules change. And then when you're on the thing, when you're recording, you still have to record it into your own system and get a good clean recording, but you're on Zoom, you know, sometimes listening, and then the you the dialogue you hear from other people doesn't sound great or it's broken up, and you're like, was that any good? What's that guy doing? You know, so what do they think of me? You know, so yeah, that like what you hear when you're recording it, and then you send your stuff in and they put it all together, uh, then you know, when you finally get that back, um, it can sound amazing. But even the last, the one of the last books I did, they ended up having to ask people to kind of go back in and re-record because levels they just couldn't make it, you know, happen. So, as much as technology is amazing, there's stuff like Source Connect where you can literally like be recording with a studio and they're grabbing your audio right now, you know, live if you have a good internet connection and all of that. You know, so there are tools out there that can do it, but not everybody has it. Certainly not in the audiobook realm. That's really, in my opinion, more for like real voiceover, you know, commercials and animated series and good stuff like that. You know, so yeah, it's uh it's um certainly not the easiest thing to do. I mean, like I said, I've only done the one full book so far, and I would love to do more, but that was the challenge getting audio levels to match between characters and myself, you know.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

So logistics for me was only part of the problem. The even bigger problem was to just get folks to really understand the character and and the context. So when I did my own audiobook, there's there's male female characters of various ages, there's a transgendered character, and they're multi-ethnic too. So I have this this this cauldron of of diversity in my book. So I I I I did the Monty Python a little bit, and and sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't, and sometimes I just gave up and just read it as Mookie, and you know that that's I'm doing a character, yeah. And I think it was acceptable for just a first really rough draft. So then I when I took it to the next level and I recruited all these people, they they didn't even read the book, they had no context, right? So I tried to coach them, which is you know, the character at this point is feeling a little bit melodramatic, but keep in mind that this is a satirical, very much a parody. They they just didn't know what the F I was talking about, and I confused them right and it completely short-circuited the process, right? So it went one way or another, they were gross exaggerations of what they were trying to interpret, my direction was trying to accomplish, or they were completely flat, yeah, and and and it just didn't work out.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

Well, that's interesting because even with uh the one book, um, I know that you know Ingrid was directing two of the voice actors uh to for how that she wanted some of it to sound, and then when I was putting it all together, I was like, Well, that's not how I would have done it. Exactly. How I wanted it to sound, like, I gotta make this work, you know. So then I was like, but then I was like, well, at least they gave me three takes, right? That was my only thing. I was like, give me three separate takes of every line, different emphasis. You know, I had to there was a few. I even took like the first part of this line and the middle of that one, and you know, so that's pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

So you went a little bit Stanley Kubrick on this with multiple takes, and it gave it gave you more latitude to flex it out and to adapt the different interpretation.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

That's the only way, the only way to do it, you know. Just from my experience of the few I've done, they they usually do that too. Like, we'll do the read through, but a lot of times they'll stop and be like, Can you just give me that same line like two more ways? Right, and then just stop and let you do it a couple of different ways, just in case, just in case the intonation is slightly different, you know, because there's nothing worse than two characters having a dialogue in an audio book, and it doesn't seem like they're in the same room at all, you know.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

So the other thing is getting it to sync, which is in the book, there might be two characters, they're not only physically present together in the scene, but they're emotionally enmeshed, right? Yeah, and it's so easy to get a disconnect. And if you're recording separately, then that just exaggerates the the fragmentation of that.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

Yeah, for sure. If I were doing any multicast thing, as much as I thought, like, oh, I'll just send out the files to the different people and tell them that I'd like knew I'd have to get specific characters together at the same time to at least give a read together so they'd feel like what it's like to hear and listen, you know, to the others' responses.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

When Pixar does the stuff too, you've got a lot of celebrity actors where scheduling is obviously a major nightmare and it's very expensive. But when you see the outtakes in the B-roll and you get the old school DVD of you know the making of, yeah, you you see Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler standing next to each other in the same room, mic'd up because they they need that inner interplay for this very reason, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:52

I often I often think when I'm recording, because I do punch and roll, so if I make a mistake, I can click a button, it backs up three seconds and I can continue, right? But before I learned how to do that really well, I used to just like snap my fingers to make a marker on the file and I just redo it. And then I had all this crazy sort of b-roll of me flubbing. I never had the time to do it, but I always thought it would be funny to go and put that together for the author to be like, here's all the stuff I did so completely wrong, you know, and how bad some of the words, some of the words, uh tongue twisters that you don't expect them to be, and you read two words together and you're like, I can't even say I've done many solo podcasts where I just hit the hot mic and I start to bloviate.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Yeah, and I I do minor editing just to make sure that if I really screw up, at least I can eliminate that section. But I'm usually pretty good at just shooting the shit. Yeah, but there have been various instances where I do make a big mistake and I stop and then restart, and then usually I get angry at myself and say, ah shit, or you know, f bomb it, and then I'll forget. You know, I'll do a search through the transcript on Riverside to edit it out, and I think a few of these have gone out like with me not identifying and clipping the uh the bit. So, you know, again, it's way more complicated, folks, than it seems, and it and it falls into the realm of true production.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Yeah, so I mean that's that's the thing is that it if and when the time comes, definitely there's an audio book to be done. It's about kind of when I never really I didn't really think about what you just said earlier about some people just won't hear it if you don't do it, you know? Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

That's their reading, right? Again, I'm just the bald guy here on the other side. I would respectfully suggest that I think your book will get more ex way more expanded reach potential if you just get that audiobook out there, and especially from a guy like you, you're an audiobook dude. You don't you don't even have to hire the talent, you are the talent. Yep. I guess that's gonna have to be the next in the queue. Yeah, I mean, I would recommend it. Don't wait, don't wait, don't wait for some a-hole to judge your book, you know, five stars or one. Just go for it. I think you do a terrific job. Uh I I lucked out with one of these. I don't want to see this apocryphal story, you might get a kick out of it. So I joined my sister's writing club for a for a stint. Uh-oh. Monday mornings, they're in Cincinnati. I'm up at 6:30. We're sharing content, reading it out loud. There is a Cornish poet named Bert Bisco, and he's loaded with the accent, and he's got the goatee, and he sits in his his labyrinthine library, and he's got his tea, and he has an exquisite, exquisite accent, especially to Meyer. So I rewrote one of the chapters in the sci-fi book in the first person to enable him not only to say the dialogue but to narrate the whole damn thing.

SPEAKER_02 32:59

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

So I still have his clip of doing the alien spider with the with the instantiation engine. It's uh it's a cylinder that can reproduce anything imaginable. That's the idea, right? Right? That's like Borges Library only. It's not books, every possible book. Yeah, it's got every possible thing in it. So it's a cool concept, and I never thought of the spider alien who's who's hanging his web over the jar, right? It would be a Cornish accented uh character. I thought he knocked it out of the park. Now, the reason I bring it up is he does spoken poetry his whole life for 50 years, he's been in the town square reading his poetry. Wow. And there there's a talent to what you do, and there's a talent to what this guy does. Oh, for sure. So going back to what we're saying is everyone thinks you know you you could just bypass professional talent, and unless you're a renaissance man or woman and you're able to just don a hat and knock everything out of the park, which is nobody on earth, get the right person for the right job, and and and you're you're it for audio, yeah and uh and now you could be it for writing, where you could adopt another skill.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

It's interesting because I still I I a hundred percent agree with you, and a lot of people have also asked me in the realm of you know the AI, like, oh, are you afraid for your job? I'm like, no, not at all. I have listened to, I have even tested to some of the AI uh programs, and none of them can give thought and feeling to anything. They can pause, they can whisper, they can, you know, try to be uh have some intonation. They can't understand what they are reading to the level that anyone that is in the audio book realm should be worried about anything, in my opinion. It's not even close, you know. And I you I use AI for fun sometimes on my Instagrams or whatever when I'm lazy and don't want to get dressed. So, you know, but but that's interesting because I was like, you know, you can even throw them into some programs that'll take your PDF file and read it to you if you don't mind listening to a monotone-ish thing that just has no clue as to how to read each sentence, you know. So so there is a true talent to read it and uh reading with and understanding and feeling the emotion and bringing the emotion and the emphasis and the pauses and the thoughts and everything that a character or narrator or the book deserves can't be done in any other way at this time.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

A thousand percent. You can get your uncle Joe or Aunt Sylvia to do your audiobook, yeah, and maybe it'll get it'll get close to a chat GPT or a Claude, right? So by nature, when you suck the life out of the contextual interpretation and an emotion of the reading, right, then it becomes literally generic. So you can so hiring an AI to do it is akin to hiring a human who's got no understanding of subtext or what's actually going on, right?

SPEAKER_01 36:20

Even from the realm of I thought about like, oh, maybe if it was a business book and I'm just literally writing like, here's how to, you know, do a thing. Um maybe and then, but even then, I think that they just might lose the interest of the person listening as well. So, you know, for me personally, I don't even think it's on the radar to be concerned about at this point.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

I uh I think that that's spot on. When I tried to coach Bert, the Cornish poet before he read this, and in my novel, which is this zany Douglas Adams, me as Hunter S. Thompson, William Gibson kind of adventure, yeah. The the two chapters he did were the real hard science fiction. So I go deep into the philosophy, I do some math, yeah, it shifts gears radically. So I felt I needed to coach Burn. Yeah, explain the concepts and what the spider was doing. And he just told me to shut up. He said, I got this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and I don't I'm not sure if he understood all the depth of what I was getting at, right? But he had the natural talent that you're describing, yeah, which is to understand the narrative and the story, yeah, and to empathetically put himself and act. It's acting, yeah, yeah. It's it's a it's a skill, folks. It's it's not just John Travolta getting lucky, he's good at what he does.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Reading, if that's all it were, but you know, it like it takes an actual skill to bring the depth of the characters to life. You know, it's not about just like, well, what funny voice will I use to differentiate this guy from that guy, you know, because then you can get your you know, kid's kid to do it or whatever. Which I try. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

You still won't get good audio levels, but the audio will suck, and guess what? The whole project is doomed to fail. I guess I'm learning, but it was a fun, it was a fun attempt to do, and that begs the question of me putting the audiobook out. So eventually I'll I'll figure I'll figure that out too. Hopefully before the sequel gets done.

SPEAKER_01 38:29

Something to revisit. Yes, yes, on the list. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you should. I I I remember you actually we did have a conversation and you had sent me the info, and I thought it was great what I got to read, and it was very whirlwind in my head, uh, storytelling, you know, all over fast and and and intense. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Um, and but at that time too, I think I was in the middle of like three different projects, so that's why I was like, ah, but you never maybe I'll I'll hit you up again if you've got bandwidth, but but the bigger tale, it's not about me, it's about you. Oh no, no, no, yeah. Well, we're just yick-yaking and it's all good, you know. Uh, I just have the one top line question too, which is why speculative fiction for you? You brought up the business stuff. I know you're doing some businessy stuff on the side too, because I see you popping up on my Instagram feed. Yeah. So how why why were you drawn to speculative fiction? Is it because you've been doing some of the audio in that genre, or do you have a natural predilection for science fiction and fantasy?

SPEAKER_02 39:35

What's your fiction?

SPEAKER_01 39:37

I am a complete science fiction fantasy nut at heart. That is my go-to. Uh, growing up, it was nothing but like John Carter of Mars series, you know. Um, uh, what was his name? I have the series here, Tom Swift and his rocket ship when I was a kid, you know, uh, and and and all the sword and sorcery kind of stuff, Terry Brooks and and The Lord of the Rings and those types of novels have just always been my thing. And um, I've I've tried to read other books and I an occasional crime thriller, you know, Tom Clancy kind of stuff. Those are great movies for me, they're just not a thing I ever read personally. Uh, maybe I would read them in the car. You know.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

So I still love that. I I think that the whole thing about language is its inherent plasticity. Yeah. And when verbs get tweaked like that and reinterpreted either culturally, through ethnic groups, or through these new genres and modalities popping up, I think it's just super. It's great.

SPEAKER_01 40:42

Oh no, for sure. No, it is funny. And it literally set me back when my friend was saying that to me. She's like, Oh, I read 16 books. What are you talking about? I know you're in a book club, but in a month, no one does that, you know. And then she told me what she meant. Just like, aha.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

And with AI, the keyboards could be just vanishing. I mean, why would you go through the laborious process of translating thought into alphanumeric strings when you could just move the muscles in your face? Yeah, and the interface is not only seamlessly interpreting your your your voice, right? But uh, but able to respond in kind, effortlessly. People are talking to their clawed bot, people are falling in love with with their chatty friend.

SPEAKER_01 41:26

Yeah, no, for sure. That makes a huge difference. Um, even a little bit of what I did in the book came through my use of a little bit of AI of just talking it through in my own head, right? And this uh new character idea, and then or just talking it out into I do everything I do. My I have a real day job, I still have to work, um, but I'm not famous on this book yet. Just kidding. Begin with the end in mind. Yeah, I talk to text everything. I I can't hardly even text on my phone anymore. I get mad when I'm in a room where I actually have to type on it because I can't just talk to my phone. So the the the stream of consciousness that just kind of comes out, you know, definitely for me, it was about like, how can I do this in the most efficient manner to make that happen?

SPEAKER_00 42:14

And that doesn't surprise me at all. You're a voice guy. And there's nothing wrong with it. I think when you go back to the age of Homer, yeah, and the first the first epics were spoken, they were memorized generation to generation, they were finely written down, right? But people didn't read them, didn't hang out on their on their leisure, on their lazy boy, and and and read them. They were shared social experiences where they were recited, much like the Cornish poet has been reciting his stuff for for decades. So I think the return to that is its own kind of poetic irony, which we're going full circle. This whole idea of writing is just a matter of translating ideas in a in a way that can be communicated with with practical use from person to person asynchronously and then from generation to generation. But now with digital, there's no reason to go through all that effort, and it begs the question of what the hell writing is and is gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 43:22

Yeah, yeah. Well, even some of the simple edit stuff, you know. I never I never really had to do it much as a writer previously because I was just writing some stuff. But in the audiobook realm, there's this amazing software that came out a few years ago that I use all the time for every audiobook I do because you can feed the manuscript into it. You do your own recording and then you upload your recording, and word for word it's watching to tell you like you inserted a word here, you didn't do that one. If you say this word, that's the wrong word. You know, you add a pause here. There's a three second pause. Did you mean to do that? And it literally can help you to determine. like and then some of it is look spoken word if I didn't change the thought process of a sentence fine done moving on right or but if it's a complete like oh gosh I said the wrong word you know now I'll go back and pick it up and they're even trying to make it to where you could do all your update edits in that software now that's not working for me because I use my own DAW but you know still the idea is so cool. So like even writing my book I mean I'll admit I threw it into Microsoft Word and was like grammar check.

SPEAKER_00 44:30

Most writers are going further than that they're putting into the chatty bro and they're having uh the AI like not only check for for typos and and grammar but rewrite scenes more optimally this is oh yeah yeah becoming practice yeah no for sure and I can see how that can completely become a thing that people can do.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

And you know what I mean at the end of the day whatever whatever works for you I guess is okay I'm like as as long as this is my idea this is my story if I use a little tweaking here and there for something I'm not the end of the world I know there's a lot of uh discussion about like and I don't want something to be written fully by AI because again just the way I feel about it doing an audio book I feel the same about its writing capability. You know you're going to be able to know when the word is is someone else's you know so so stay true to yourself yep and while you're doing so explore explore different opportunities to express your creativity and you've done exactly that with this all the latest tools be aware of them at least they may not all work they may not all be the the best thing for you but some of them can be very helpful so and use those tools to explore other opportunities to express yourself in different modalities if you can agree yeah I agree and you've done that and I wish you the best of luck it's not just luck it's talent and determination and it's awesome that you've entered the realm of the author what why why not now I don't know if it's gonna stop because now there's there's all these other ones pouring out so we'll see what happens.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

That's the greatest thing of all right tapping into the the the endless juicy trove of of stuff inside your own head and heart. Yep that to me is the definition of happiness your your fates can rise and fall you could be rich or poor you got fired you got hired right but this is something that we do for ourselves at 100% every creative day and it's so satisfying and it's satisfying talking to a fellow kindred creative soul thank you so much Scott for making time in your even more busy day now that you're thank you for inviting me it was fun. Super fun like comment share subscribe everybody it's Mr. Scott Allen uh doubling down his audio view work with his new book The Airy Protocol which is available on Amazon I'll have the link in the description below got pre-order for the Kindle you've you've done kind of a reverse reverse engineering of the launch after the paper back folks that's right all right good for you Scott thanks so much and I'd love to have you back uh thank you see how things are going and and for your next one too don't don't stop keep going buddy thank you that'd be great damn bursting for you creatively great to see