The countdown begins

Looking forward to Christmas (but Halloween first)

A sensible man doing silly voices

Well now, here we go. July is over, which means we’re into the second half of the year, at the top of the slide into Autumn, and then Christmas. With a little stop off at Halloween, of which more later.

As far as Christmas is concerned, its a-comin.

Jon and I met up to have a little rehearsal for this year’s story. We were mostly trying to decide on voices: getting the tone of the narrator right, but then deciding on the voices for the main characters. And they’re a pretty good bunch, including some Scots, a Brummie and Welsh. And if you’re a regular listener to the podcast, you’ll know that there’s a recurring Christmas figure who always has a Welsh accent in our stories, so you should be able to have a good guess at the identity of at least one character in this year’s.

It used to be that I’d get a happy surprise every Autumn when Jon would send me his first recordings and I’d find out for the first time what all my characters sounded like, but these days we record together anyway so we tend to discuss his choices then. But recording has its own pressures and requirements. The rehearsal was Jon’s idea and it’s an excellent one, giving us a chance to sit down and figure out the tone and style we want without distractions.

And it was still delightful to hear the characters for the first time.

That’s my sister’s flat we were rehearsing in, by the way. For the recordings I’m going to have to drag poor old Jon down to the suburbs where I live, but that does mean I can take him on a walk round the real life settings for this year’s story. But I’ll tell you more about that closer to the time.

Before then, though, comes Halloween. If you’re one of those podcast regulars, you’ll also know that I also always write little short stories for Halloween, and I have some news about those too.