A Book by Any Other Medium

So, here's the thing about being a writer who, incidentally, lacks the time and means to be a writer exclusively: time tends to be a commodity that is precious, and oftentimes scant. As such, any time that I don't dictate to writing is usually reserved for a full-time job, household duties, the maintenance of relationships, and all the other things that a normal, functioning human does on a day-to-day basis. I'm not complaining by any means, but to offer an example, I just took a break mid-sentence to help move a table from my dining room. I guess you could say free time is a bit tight. The biggest issue in this is that I don't have nearly enough time to do the one thing that every writer ought to do (barring, of course, actually writing), read.

Now, when I was younger, I had always thought the idea of audiobooks was dumb, and kind of lazy. As I got older, and therein dropped all my adolescent pretense, I simply eschewed the format out of personal preference. Nowadays, I find myself in a position where, without the audiobook format, I would not have become familiarized with the writings of HP Lovecraft, nor would I have ever come across Wil Wheaton's Just a Geek, which was a huge inspiration for me during my time spent writing The Summerlark Elf. Most recently, I decided to start consuming more fantasy fiction, for the simple fact that, despite the fact that I am a fantasy author myself, I am painfully under-read in the genre. So now, thanks to the fact that I can listen as I cook, or clean, or commute, I managed to get through the first book of Ursula K LeGuin's Earthsea Cycle in less than a week, albeit whilst Pat Rothfuss' Wise Man's Fear has been sitting in a half-read state on my end table for a couple of months now (sorry, Pat...).

I imagine some of the people reading this have already read A Wizard of Earthsea. If you haven't, do so, because it is a classic for a reason. If so, I encourage you to give the audiobook a listen, even if you do have time to read. The narrator, Rob Inglis, is nothing short of perfection, and I am very much looking forward to delving into the rest of the cycle, largely because of his job on book one. If ever there was a want for audio versions of my books, he'd be the first person I'd look up.