Geoff Micks

My best friend & I gave a mutual acquaintance a ride home. Afterwards, on my own ride home we listened to half an album that was the soundtrack to a roadtrip we took together half a lifetime ago. He remembered it when I played it. I've been playing it all this time. It gives me the warm and fuzzies.

Sometimes I think I'm so bloody clever, so open-minded, so willing to hold two ideas in my head and weigh their merits equally. Then I remember I rarely read murder mysteries because I'm always frustrated I can't figure out the whodoneit. Maybe I'd get better with practice, but is that recreational?

Hers is a natural talent, and I am sure she could work as a voice artist at a very high level if that was an ambition she wishes to pursue. I'm very aware how lucky I am that she volunteered for this part before I had ever considered turning my novels into an audio drama.

Thank you, Melissa!

6/6

We were never in the same room, and she did almost all of her acting without any direction from me. I heard what she did, and I had no notes. What you are hearing is how she interpreted the dialogue from reading the novels, and she reads it how I heard it in my own head when I wrote it.

5/6

Second, I want to praise my friend Melissa Buttrill for the wonderful work she has done as a voice actor on this project. This is the first episode where her character and the narrator interact, so this is the best time to say she recorded all of her lines before I had recorded any of mine.

4/6

Two notes for this week? First, as this is the season's shortest episode, I will be publishing the Season Two Bonus Episode on Wednesday. I will not do a social media push for that, so keep an eye out in your feed wherever you get your podcasts if you have the interest.

3/6

For Season Two Episode Nine of The Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast —at the halfway mark of the series— the narrator and his uninvited guest meet for the first time.

Here's a link full of links to hear more:
linktr.ee/taperecorder...

2/6

The premise of my #audiodrama #podcast is:

In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last Ice Age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him.

1/6

Today was one of those beautiful March days where you didn't need a winter coat, and I even wore sunglasses in the afternoon for reasons that did not involve snow blindness. What would have been in the chilly side in Autumn felt glorious in early Spring.

I just watched an ad with an AI-generated voice that pronounced automatic 'automagic' and knife as 'ka-nife'.

AI may be a useful tool in some applications, but it's not going to replace people in the long run. It makes just as many errors as people do, but it makes errors people never would.

Well written, well said.

We all have an accent, and I enjoy when I spot mine.

Anyway, I know coyote is pronounced 'ky-yo-tee,' and I do so. I just caught myself reading the word and pronouncing it 'ky-yott,' which is less common but not unknown where I live.

I say it one way and read it another? I wonder why?

My wife and her friend group have a long-running annual 'crafty girls night' where they go make something together: candles, pottery, Christmas ornaments, jewelry, what-have-you. It's getting tough to be original.

This year they're making hook rugs with a sewing machine gun? It looks pretty cool.

I'm a couple of weeks into learning French via Duolingo. I think that's long enough to start making comments about it on social media?

First up, this app REALLY want me to know the French word for sandwich is sandwich.

Also? I am being drilled to understand and repeat, "My sister is very mean."

My father smoked a pipe back in the 1980s. That was the only thing a car cigarette lighter couldn't get going. There was no way to get the heat down into the bowl. I distinctly remember him driving with his knees while he lit his pipe with a match.

Ah, childhood...

I am really proud of this one. If you have not listened to any of these yet, this is an excellent almost-standalone episode to try something in the middle rather than going back to the beginning.

4/4

Historical fiction is not really her thing, but between St. Paul's shipwreck mentioned in the Bible and my late grandfather's time in the North Atlantic during the Second World War, she was able to imagine a storm at sea.

3/4

Here's a link full of links to hear more:

linktr.ee/taperecorder...

A personal note to go along with this week's episode? Across all three novels that are the source material for this audio drama podcast, this is the only story of mine I have ever read to my 100-year-old grandmother.

2/4

S2E08 of The Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast sees the narrator survive a terrible shipwreck in a storm at sea, only to be rescued by a man named Pytheas who should be included among history's greatest explorers; sadly, his name is only remembered because so many geographers called him a liar.

1/4

"Have you ever considered harvesting your spider babies?"

My jaw dropped. 'Oh, my God. My wife is having a stroke,' I thought.

It turns out my sister had a spider plant behind me ready to propogate. This was a conversation about houseplants. Not a clot in my wife's brain causing word salad.

What kind of morning is it?

Well, I put my undershirt on backwards and inside out, took it off, fixed it, then still somehow put it on backwards.

It's a 'get dressed three times' kind of morning, I guess.

So an economics professor wasn't paying attention to perhaps the biggest economic trend of the last several decades? That's pretty damning. Why should anyone take his 'expert' opinion as more valuable than the uncle at Thanksgiving dinner who thinks the world still runs the way it did in the 1980s?

It was the final death of a place that had mattered to the narrator for more than five hundred years, and there was nothing he could do to stop it, although he certainly tried.

Here's a link full of links to hear more: linktr.ee/taperecorder...

3/3

#historicalfiction #audiodrama #podcast

Not only did Alexander the Great sack the city and send its inhabitants away in chains, but he ordered the island to be forever transformed into the headland of a peninsula one bucket of dirt at a time so it would never again be able to defy an invading army.

2/3

#historicalfiction #audiodrama

For Season Two Episode Seven of The Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast our narrator shares with deep regret how Alexander the Great destroyed the ancient island city of Tyre, whose royal women had once made a safe and happy home for an immortal wanderer.

1/3

#historicalfiction #audiodrama #podcast

Putting to one side that Shatner has always been musical (his album Has Been, a collaboration with Ben Folds, is actually really good!), at some point do we want to talk about him trying to get as many cool things into his future obituary as possible? This is some Christopher Lee stuff here!

My wife and I have been watching Olympic hockey in the evenings after work.

Do you know how HARD it is not to get hockey spoilers as a Canadian? I'm lucky. I work from home, and I can just not look at a social media for a while. Everyone she sees all day is trying to be a CBC colour commentator.

Wait, is it pronounced FAFO or F-A-F-O? FOMO is definitely 2 syllables, but I just saw someone on TikTok spell it out in casual conversation, and now I lack confidence to say aloud a term I read all the time. This could be me pronouncing meme as 'me-me' all over again, or the great GIF/JIF debate...

I love my mother dearly, but she has a quirk where if she has a change in her schedule, she needs to walk me through all the steps that led to that change, even if I didn't know the previous appointment in the first place.

Come to think of it, that's probably where I picked up my own verbosity.

Ramadan Mubarak to all who celebrate 🌙