Published yesterday was Issue 90 of Starship Sofa's Aural Delights. In this issue you will find me narrating Richard Johnson's flash fiction story A Friend In Need.

I was at the Lyceum in Edinburgh tonight to see Peer Gynt. This is a very "Modern" interpretation of the tale. The performances were excellent and I liked the set design and lighting.

Unfortunately I wasn't convinced by the Jerry Springer cast of gross characters, which to me is a fault with the script. The actors did an amazing job with what they had. The only likeable character did what the plot needed her to do, not what you might expect her to do.

Which all meant that my emotions were never allowed to engage. If all that talent and effort had been put to work with a better script then this could have been a stunning show.

I am no where near exploiting my latest piece of tech.  It is a Behringer BCF2000.  A USB-MIDI controller.

Using the Mackie Emulation mode it Just Works(tm) with Ardour. Well, that's a tiny bit of an exaggeration.  You doo need to put the BCF into a Mackie Emulation mode, then you need to edit your Ardour config file (.ardour2/ardour.rc) to mention the BFC.  After that, as long as I remember to switch it on before opening ardour, it is working perfectly well.

It is still habit to reach for the control on the screen with the mouse or to the keyboard, rather than the BCF.  That will just take practice.  And sadly I'm trying to relearn some of what I have forgotten.  I've been using Ardour during the last year, but since I finished Episode 6, I haven't done anything with SFX.  Mostly just narrations.  I'm getting there, and possibly trying a few more complicated configurations.

The last scene I was editing this evening involves transitions between 5 locations, including flipping over to the other end of a phone call.  Using the Behringer is making me look at how I structure this scene differently.  The sound of a penny dropping on how I could manage this with about a third of the Sends I would have used before was almost enough to drown out the sound of the weight-lifter upstairs dropping all his weights.

No, I'm not highly strung.  I just like it under my desk.

A pleasant surpise today was the the arrival of Gregg Taylor's Tales of the Red Panda: The Crime Cabal.  This book of based on the series of free Audio Drama's that have been produced by Gregg for  Decoderring Theatre since 2005 (and before).  If you like your Pulp superheroes with a slug of wit and sass, then this book is for you.  The Red Panda, together with The Flying Squirrel, protects the Toronto of the 1930s from crime, corruption and invaders from other dimensions.  Highly recommended!  You'll also find the fantastic Black Jack Justice in their archives, also writter the Gregg Taylor.  Each show is under 30 minutes long.  Listen to one.

New scene written for episode 8. Six pages, just shy a 1000 words. And now it's time I went for a walk.

Yes, of course the title is relevant.

I have been revising a few scenes from episode 8 and went back and reinstated three scenes into episode 7 that I had been trying to rewrite. I may need to recast a role to get those scenes in. I had been very resistant to the idea of recasting but I really can't figure the story past that point without that character in place.

Hopefully I'll hear back from the actor concerned and I won't need to. But I at least have a plan that will work if he doesn't want to continue. Unfortunately the last time I heard from him was five months ago, so I've no idea what their answer is going to be.

I'll need to recast a couple of not-yet recorded characters if it comes to that. To avoid having someone talk to themselves too much. I don't think I'm going to avoid that totally though, but I think that'll end up being me that does it.

No, I'm not mad. Not clinically.

I've been knocking my head against a small problem with my SFX Library. I'd upgraded the local drupal site that I use to index the 27000+ files from version 5 to 6. Unfortunately a couple of the modules I had used in drupal 5 weren't the same in 6.

Thankfully it's all working now, and is backed up. I can finally get on with mixing some more scenes again.

Yesterday I got synopses written for episodes 10 and 11, but wasn't sure about the last couple of scenes. Had hoped to be at a certain point by then but it would have felt rushed to cut to the next part of the story. More needed to happen or it would have felt far too rushed.

Tonight I rewrote the synopses for those last two scenes, and fitted in more revelations, to end out episode 11. All scenes in Episode 12 now also have synopses. And someone we may have forgotten makes a reappearance. Because it was time.

And this brings me to the half-way point in Estalvin's Legacy. Now I just need to turn them into scripts, record, edit and release them.

I'm much happier with this form for these episodes. Now I can go back and do some post-production on episode 7. After that I'll need to look at how much re-writing is needed in the episode 8 script to accommodate cast drop out.

Thank you Bradford for the positive feedback.

In training today and tomorrow through in Glasgow. Shibboleth Core Skill Service Providers. I only just remembered that I was even going to this training last night.

I had left the office and was settling down in the Staff Room to do more work on Estalvin's Legacy. More by chance than anything else I looked at my Calender and saw a big entry that spanned the next two days. What's that?, I thought. Two days of training was what that was.

Just before leaving the office I had left a laptop installing some data files that were going to be used for part of a demo later the next day. The plan had been to finish that off this morning. Of course, now I wouldn't be in the office to do so.

Writing was canceled and I went back to the office to finish the job and pass it on to The Boss so it wasn't falling into limbo.

I didn't get any writing done, but I did make it to Pizza Hut only ten minutes late. After which James, Alan and I went to see Star Trek. I didn't say much in my previous post and I won't now. Except to say that it is close to being the best Star Trek movie so far. Khan has a serious challenger people.

Unfortunately I was late for the start of the training today. Mostly because I'm a dumb-ass and got on the wrong train out of Haymarket. Nothing against the very pretty scenic route I took, and thankfully it was still a Glasgow bound train I did get on. But it was indeed the scenic route through Carstairs and Carluke, arriving in Glasgow Central at the time the training was supposed to start. Glasgow Central. The wrong station too, so I had an even further walk to go.

The photo is the Gluten Free lunch that was laid on for me.

I managed to write up three scenes of synopsis for episode 10 on the train back home.

Anyway, I'm back home now. Going out shortly for a new thing I'm going to try. Dancing. Beginners class this evening, now that my Tuesday nights are 'free' after last week's show.

Well I think it lives up to the hype. I look forward to seeing it again soon.

It might have been noticed that Estalvin's Legacy hasn't had a new episode out in nearly a year. I accept full responsibility for this and am humbled by the fact that there are still so many subscribers regularly checking for new episodes.

First of I need to apologise for not saying anything about what was or wasn't happening before. Ten months of silence. Not cool. I'm sorry for leaving you all to wonder if you had wasted your time listening so far.

What happened?

I had written scripts for the next six episodes a year and a half ago. Unfortunately when I went back to start preparing them for recording I found that I really wasn't happy with what I had written. The overall story was being served, but I really didn't like how I had gone about it.

I admit, I lost faith in myself. In my ability to pull this thing off. Estalvin's Legacy is a very large project and I fully realise now that I should had either started on a smaller project first or completed all the scripts and all the recording before releasing the first episode. However, this was back in late 2005 when I started, and I wanted to be in, if not the first, then perhaps the second or third wave of new podcast audio dramas coming out.

I have never thought that I wouldn't finish Estalvin's Legacy. I have considered the possibility that it might not be as an Audio Drama. However, I got past the bulk of that. There are parts that I have come to realise will have to be rendered as prose regardless. But Estalvin's Legacy will continue as it began.

I am invested in this story. I need to finish it. I know how it ends, I know what changes each of the characters will undergo.

Where are we now?

Episodes 7 and 8 are a two-parter focusing on the Kalsorin and La'Shareti.

Episode 7: mostly recorded, with a few scenes already post-produced.

Episode 8: needs the script to be revised to account for a couple of actors that have dropped out of contact. I'd rather not recast a role if I can possibly avoid it.

Episodes 9-12(?) return to focus on Sarah, Peter, Nicolas and Elkin as we find out where they have gone following the strangly behaving Peter through the Talim Portal. This is the section that I have had the most problems rewriting. I eventually pruned back to the essentials of what I needed to do with the character and story at this point and only added back in those elements that helped to achieve that. I'm much happier with my new synopsis.

Episode 9: has been broken down into a scene-by-scene synopsis.

I'll update my progress on each of these as they progress.