Final Episode of THE TRANSPORT Podcast Out Today

A half-year rollercoaster comes to an end. Today I posted the last episode of my audiobook podcast THE TRANSPORT. 130 Chapters, 100K+ words, close to 500 pages. It was an experiment during the “boring” phases of the CORONA pandemic of lockdowns and public-life standstill. I learned a lot about reading aloud during those 26 weeks, about noise management (as I recorded predominantely in my living room at night), and about all the mistakes I still had in the manuscript despite a highly paid editor (Update time to the print and eBook editions of THE TRANSPORT!)

Will I repeat this? Maybe not. It took a lot of time off my writing activities. But it was fun during a stressful time, just as much fun as conceiving and writing my COVID Trouble over-the-top thriller last year. Hopefully, fingers crossed, this will be the last Corona project, two years is enough.

News of the Week - Writing, Publishing, Promoting - How I Spent My Easter Vacations!

It’s been a while since I gave an update on my various workings. Shame on me. But here’s a quick one. What’s going on in the Ames-Universe?

• The Transport audiobook podcast is proceeding quite nicely. Episode 13 just came out and recording / producing is fun, though the technical part is purely down to automation and handiwork these days. It wil occupy me for some weeks to come but is a nice distraction from pure writing chores.

• Parallel to the podcast, The Transport also comes up chapter-by-chapter on Wattpad. A weak ploy to get more readers, however not many readers have caught on yet. Well, there’s hope.

• Another Wattpad & Co project of mine has upstarted. It’s sort of a manga-fantasy-demon hunter story of a young girl destined to balance the worlds of good and evil, a quest she had to accept against her will. As this, for now, will be a pure online project, I plan to pack the story into a TV-style format. The four stories are set up episode style, full stories in their own rights with one overarching story line holding it together and investigating the girl’s challenges with her demon hunter situation. The four episodes will form season one. Let’s see what comes out of it. Idea is to publish it in all the online outlets, accompanied with some kick-ass manga graphics of a girl with a demon hunter sword. Episode 1 is near writing completion and will go to the editor, soon.

• On the side, I am writing on a thriller idea I had for some time, inspired by these old-man stories that are personified by old Clint Eastwood and other senior action heroes. A mix of “Torino” and R.E.D., if you get my drift. Bob Prescott, retired, widowed, 72, housesits for his daughter in the small Florida coastal town Pelican Coast and gets drawn into the more seedy underbelly of the charming and peaceful town. It’s fun to write, as I make Bob out to be a very unapologetic guy. And an extremely, extremly ruthless guy. Pelican Coast’s underworld will have sleepless nights!

Out Now: The Transport - A SciFi Military Action Alien Thriller

New Year, new book. Sounds as if I had been busy over the last months. First the publication of my new Troubleshooter thriller COVID Trouble, and today the announcement of my first full-length scifi action novel The Transport.

But looks are deceiving. COVID Trouble had its first word written in July 2020 with an aim of 50K words, whereas The Transport already started way back in 2019. From the point of complexity, The Transport was way more ambitious. I aimed for 120K words, put down 130k, split up onto four point of view main characters. With a book of that magnitude, everything takes longer. The conception, the writing, the editing, the external editor reworks, whew!

The additional challenge for this book: I wanted to try something new regarding marketing. So I had the mad idea to create an audio book version of The Transport, too, and publish it as a Podcast. Several lifes ago, I used to be a recording musician and had some idea about recording technologies, but the step from a MIDI sequencer on an ATARI ST1040 to Pro Logic X on the Mac was a big one. But with the help of a lot of YouTube tutorials I managed to set up the narration in an acceptable quality (I hope, you’ll be the judges).