Dear Coffee Club Members: tomorrow night, Wednesday, July 31, you’re welcome to attend a presentation by Judith Briles, a writing consultant par excellence. It’s free, it starts at 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, and it’s sponsored by the Independent Publishers of New England. You needn’t be a member to sign up. Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE? ~ Cheers, Jack
Ruby Fink is Our New Associate Editor, Audio Arts
We’re very pleased to announce Ruby Fink’s promotion to Associate Editor of Audio Arts. Ruby began working with Fictional Café in the fall of 2016. We published her “Mickie McKinney, Boy Detective,” podcast series, which she wrote, directed and managed to get produced by bribing the actors with pizza. “Mickie” ran serially on FC in 2017. Ruby studied Film Production at Chapman University’s Dodge College, with a minor in Narrative and Dramatic Literature. She has her own production company, Faux Fiction Audio, in L.A. We offered Ruby the podcasting baristaship shortly after running the Mickie McKinney series, and since then she has been a major FC contributor and collaborator. She has brought us – and you – audio works from Jack J. Ward’s Electric Vicuna Productions, Kennedy Phillip’s “Magus Elgar,” M. “Josh” Donnelan’s “Six Cold Feet,”…
Breaking News at The Fictional Cafe
We’d like a few moments of your time to share some special Barista News with you. Even though we’re 100 percent volunteer, non-commercial, and free for everyone to submit and read, that doesn’t mean there aren’t people working hard to bring Fictional Cafe to you. So we want to introduce several people who are making, and have helped make, Fictional Cafe what it is today. Every creative work submitted to FC is juried by two or three baristas. In the beginning, six years ago, all of that work fell on two baristas’ shoulders – Jack’s and Caitlin’s. What’s truly wonderful is that we have attracted talented people in all of our creative categories who have a voice in choosing what we publish. They all appear on our Baristas page. The people you’re about to meet…
“The Age of Light” – Reprising Our Interview with First-Time (And Very Successful!) Author Whitney Scharer
A little over a year ago, we published an interview with Whitney Scharer, whose novel had landed her a million-dollar book deal. Only problem was, we had to wait another year to read her book. At the time, we wrote: “Barista Rachael Allen meets the novelist everyone will be talking about. Whitney Scharer and her fierce protagonist are set to take the literary world by storm! At this time next year, Whitney Scharer’s debut novel, The Age of Light, will stare up at you from your nightstand. The book will not stare at you so much as, potentially, display a woman staring into the distance, anonymously cropped at the neck, with scenic Paris blurred behind her. As much as she hopes for something different, Scharer says wryly, audiences are familiar with this kind of book…
An Interview with Ana Clements, Voiceover Artist
Creating an audiobook is hard work. Maybe harder than writing, but it’s similar, too, in that the work must go through several revision cycles. You can simply listen to a recording to catch errors, or you can listen and follow along in the manuscript or the book. But neither is a guarantee you’ll catch all of the audio flubs. As with a book manuscript, you’ll need to review it again and again. Believe me. So it wasn’t until I was listening to the sixth audio revision of my latest novel Anarchy that I noticed a particular character’s voiceover just wasn’t quite good enough. The character was Miss Caitlin Dugan in Chapter 7. (By the bye, that chapter is entitled “A Reading at the Fictional Cafe, a doubly fictional coffee house in New York City, which…