The first two nights were rehearsal nights at the Full Cast office. At that time, we lived in a one-room studio apartment with a kitchenette-I didn’t realize that having a full kitchen with a large refrigerator would drive Tim a little crazy. All Tim cared about was finding a grocery store so he could buy things for the refrigerator. All I cared about that first night was going to bed. When Bruce is on the move, he leaves little more than a blur behind.įull Cast put us up in a suite hotel, which is more like an apartment building than a hotel: the residents get a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom. Since Bruce is that way most of the time, I don’t know why I didn’t expect it from him as a driver, too. (We happen to have a record for getting lost at least once on any trip, and we work hard to maintain it.) Driving behind “Lead Foot Coville,” as Tim promptly named him, was an exercise in the art of keeping up. We followed Bruce and his family back to Syracuse, priding ourselves on getting lost only twice. Our journey began in Framingham, Massachusetts, the Sunday after the close of the Boskone science fiction convention. If Tim got a tiny part, he was going to sulk. We, however, were just there that first year to do one book. There’s always the chance for a big part in the next production. It’s different when you’re in a company like our radio company or like Full Cast. Like most actors, he believes the wise old saying about “there are no small parts, only small actors” is a keg of crocodile puckey. You see, my beloved Spouse Creature was an actor before and at the same time he was a radio actor. Bruce had said he’d cast Tim in something, since Tim knows my characters and stories as well as I do, if not better (I forget a lot of details in the Chase for the Next Book), but we weren’t sure how much he’d be able to use Tim. I was also nervous on my own behalf-I would be the narrator, and I hadn’t been a voice actor in over a decade-and that of my husband Tim. (He and his company had to work with a risk in my case, the possibility that, because I’d done audio productions before, I might try to impose my views on their actors and working style.) (Bruce would find out later that, rather than think I would tell them how to do it right, I was yelping, “No responsibility! Whee!”) But I didn’t know if he would have people who would match what I’d had in mind as I wrote, and I wouldn’t be directing them Bruce would. I knew that Bruce had done full cast books for years with Listening Library, before it was bought by Random House, and now with the Full Cast Audio company. Of course, that was what I’d learned of voice productions during the 1980s, when I chose the actors who performed my audio plays, to the point of writing parts with particular actors in mind. With audio productions, though, the right actor can give the listener’s imagination an extra hook on which to hang her/his imagination, the extra boost that makes the book live in the listener’s mind. With movies and television, the studio’s choice of actors and visual details never quite matches the way anyone, particularly the author, imagined the story. Because of my background in doing radio during the 1980s, I was thrilled to have the chance to get in front of a microphone again and to hear my characters given life by a group of good actors. In 2001 or 2002, I forget which, my friend and fellow writer Bruce Coville approached me about recording my Circle of Magic quartet with his new audio book company, Full Cast Audio. (See Photo Galleries for numerous production stills.)
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