Those of you who know my reading tastes know that the majority of my pleasure reading is listening. These days my audiobooks all come from Audible. I’ve had a long and fruitful relationship with this company. Not only do they stock recordings of fifty-five of my stories (mostly read by me) but you can also find my novels LOOK INTO THE SUN and WILDLIFE (not read by me!) in their store. Why, I even owned stock in the company, back before it was acquired by Amazon! I have been on the two-books-a- month plan for some twenty years now.
Know that I am aware that Amazon's ambition to rule the consumer marketplace can mean hard times for its competitors and has not been a good thing for Publishing As We Know It. But as a writer ... er ... content creator, I feel that it's important to get my stuff where readers can find it. Does that make me a Jeff Bezos fan? No, it does not.
Anyway, recently Audible has been offering a range of short works at no extra cost as a perk for members on what they call the Audible channels. But it’s not only Audible members who can download from the channels – if you have an Amazon prime account, you’re invited too. The quickie audiobooks on the various channels include not only the usual suspects like sf and fantasy, fiction, mystery but also news, science, comedy -- you name it. They advertise this as “Original audio series, plus playlists handcrafted for every interest.” #AudibleChannels
All this is by way of saying that today the “handcrafted” lead story in the Adrenaline Channel is a creepy little horror tale called “The Ice Is Singing,” written and read by me. It’s appropriate that it is this week’s selection since I wrote it fourteen years ago almost to the day … right after I ventured out onto the thin ice of the lake for the first skating of the season. Listener, you’ll be happy to know I survived