No good deed, it would appear to confirm, goes unpunished. From the "new release section we downloaded Hidden Hrbor (HH) and Planet Secrets (PS).
As our close and personal friend George Takei would say, oh myyyy! Both got very early WSRHs. If the reader will recall, a WSRH is a signal that we bailed on a podcast based on what we heard up to that point. The remainder of the podcast might be nothing short of brilliant, but we, and we suspect a large portion of the listening public, will never know. In any creative writing class, the teacher stresses over and over one important point. Hook the audience. Make them buy in and want to turn the page. If the author does not, they will lose reader's atention, and their purchases. And so it is with audiobooks.
To the heart of it. HH, by Jay Smith, held our deer-in-the-headlight attention for maybe five minutes. The flaws it suffered were, to our ear, too legion to justify continued listening. First, HH started with the scene where the young Bruce Wayne is leaving the threater late at night with his parents. They stray into a seedy part of town, fishes out of water. Mayhem promised to ensue. Ah, Mr. Smith, that's the start of Batman, and the first Batman movie. We mean, it is rather blatently the start of Batman, both in print and on screen. Furthermore, the lack of judgment displayed by the father in HH is significantly worse than that of the senior Mr. Wayne. No one is that dumb. Period. So, based on a derivative and hard to buy into plot, we had to redline this one early.
PS, by Trisha Wilson, was actually not quite as appealing as HH. The narrative mainly did PS in. Colby Trax (who ever that is) must have been paid to produce PS. If so, Colby would not only be the name of a tasteless cheese, but the name of a professional production house. A professional production house should know better than to produce such an unacceptable narration. The male voice speaks exclusively in a harsh, penetrating whisper. Who speaks for pages on end in a harsh whisper? No one. As to content in PS, there was not possible to buy into. The hook was that the narrator wanted to stay in college for free, forever. Not a good hook. There was no BFF factor. Further, in the short portion we could bear, there was zero build-up, or escalating storyline. No advancing action. We suggest Ms. Wilson join a local writer's group and hone her writing in that venue. Please recall Hemingway's cynical snark that a writer's first million words are shit. After that, hopelly, Papa would conceed that excellent writing could occur.
