Tags
books, Coch a Gwyn, creative-writing, Fiction, gods of diplomacy, humanvoicesonly, lurking omnibus, short stories, voice acting, writing
Friday 26th June was the kick off for the Human Voices Only campaign across various social media. Using the hashtag #HumanVoicesOnly, it brought together voice artists and writers to showcase the talent of the written and spoken word.
A number of voice artists and writers took part in the campaign. Each writer submitted short extracts of their work (up to a minute’s worth of reading time, so about 200 words) and they were assigned to voice actors. The actors recorded their interpretation of the piece and put together a video for posting on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
I submitted three extracts, expecting maybe one of them. I was pleasantly surprised to find all three got recorded!
The pieces submitted were all from Lurking Omnibus, my short story collection. Two were from Coch a Gwyn, my totally not a Love Story about dragons. The third was from Gods of Diplomacy, the Arcroc tale where Captain Rachel Drake has to go undercover to stop a nefarious womanising diplomat. The story where I had to stop myself from having her say ‘The name’s Drake, Rachel Drake…’
All three were read by Abby Hopewell who did a remarkable job interpreting the characters and themes with very little guidance from me.
It was quite a weird feeling to hear my words said aloud by someone else. Quite the ego trip. I have done readings of my work at conferences before (anyone who knows me knows I am not shy about this) but I am seriously considering hiring Abby just to come to cons to do it for me. Not that I could afford that… If I can figure out a way to sell it, I would also consider hiring her to read the full versions of some of the stories. Not had much experience of selling audiobooks though so this may have to be a long term plan.
I was also amused to see the comments on the videos on Insta. Lot of people liked the characters (or, in one case, said they already hated one of them… in a nice way…).
So, all in all, a very positive experience and one which has, I am sure, made progress in promoting the idea that creativity and art should be human not AI.
The other two videos are shown below…
Lurking Musings 