HJ reporter Scott Roche recently had the opportunity to interview P. G. Holyfield about Murder At Avedon Hill, his podcast novel. His work can be found here.
Hollywood Jesus: PG, can you give me your view of what MAAH is all about?
P.G. Holyfield: Well, the elevator pitch would be something like “It’s Name of the Rose meets Brotherhood of the Wolf.”
[It] is a murder mystery in the spirit of the medieval murder mysteries of Ellis Peters or Susanna Gregory, but set in a fantasy world where magic works, monsters exist, and the gods can choose to live mortal lives in order to directly affect events in the world.
If you want more of a blurb… Lord Avedon has a problem. Generations of Avedons have watched over Avedon Hill and controlled the only pass through the Lantis Mountains. Traditions are important to the Avedon family, but one tradition has tragically come to an end. Gretta Platt, Housemistress of Avedon Manor, has been murdered. A member of the Platt family has always served the Avedons as Housemistress… until now.
Only a handful of people live at Avedon Hill, and most are suspects. Arames Kragen, retired Aarronic Advisor and scholar of prophecy, arrives at the gates of Avedon Hill, hoping to gain access to the Olviaran Pass. Lord Avedon is not in a giving mood, however…
This is the story of Arames Kragen and his attempt not only to discover who killed Gretta Platt, but also to uncover the truth about a town that apparently has more secrets than inhabitants.
HJ: What lead you to that particular mashup? It’s the first of that kind that I’ve seen.
PGH: I’ve been writing and playing in this setting (The Land of Caern) since I was a teenager. But the story of how this “mashup” came about is an interesting one. I was greatly involved in the fan community of a computer game called Neverwinter Nights. Are you familiar with that game?
HJ: Heard of it, but never played it.
PGH: It came out in 2003, and was the first computer game that allowed creators to build D&D modules that players could then play through using the game engine.
HJ: That sounds awesome.
PGH: I was working with two other guys to create a tournament module. It was going to be a module where multiple teams could play through it at the same time, and the goal was to discover who murdered the mayor’s “Girl Friday.” I wrote the plot and created the maps, while the other guys worked on the scripting and other items that would make everything work in the game. Like so many online endeavors, things ended before they ever really got off the ground.
But by the time I was done I had a fully realized town, multiple murderers (the game was going to randomly assign who was the murderer, so it could be played by more than one team and the murderer could still be a secret). Because of the nature of the game, I also had conversation trees for every person in town that players could speak to. So, I decided to take the plot and place the story in my fantasy setting. So I ended up with a fantasy/murder mystery.
Once I decided to write it as a novel, I began releasing chapters on a community website associated with NWN. After around 20 chapters and lots of positive feedback, I decided to stop releasing chapters and finish the novel.
HJ: I read on your site that this combo made finding a publisher difficult. Can you talk about that in some detail?
PGH: By the time I had completed the novel I had a 145,000 murder mystery… not exactly what publishers are looking for in a mystery (most mysteries average around 80,000 words). That word count is okay for an epic fantasy novel, but Murder at Avedon Hill is a novel that takes place in a single town… not your standard epic fantasy fare.
I knew going in that this would not be a traditionally saleable novel. But by the time I was nearing the completion of the first draft I knew I was going to podcast the novel. As for publishers, I only sent it out to 3 publishers and no agents. My goal is to continue building an audience during this podcast, hopefully get some writing credits along the way, and then send my second novel out to agents (when I finish it, of course).
HJ: That’s a great segue to my next question. You’ve elected to self publish via podcasting and you mentioned using Lulu.com on your site. Obviously you and I both view this as a positive step. Have you run into any negative views of going in this direction, and what would you say to those folks that might look down on this approach?
PGH: I truly haven’t pushed the novel on the podcast in an attempt to make sales. I’ve sold a few, but I think I’ve sold more t-shirts than books over the last three months.
The paradigm shift that is occurring (albeit very slowly) is very simple. Who should decide what is worthy of being published? Companies or consumers?
With the Internet you can get your work out in front of people. With podcasting, if you work hard enough you can get your work in front of a hell of a lot of people. Right now around 6,000 people have tried Murder at Avedon Hill, either through my site or through Podiobooks.com. The alternative ten years ago? My novel would be in a drawer somewhere, or sent off to multiple publishers that wouldn’t give it a second glance because either “We’re a fantasy publisher, and this is a mystery” or “We’re a mystery publisher, and this is a fantasy.”
As for using a company like Lulu, it’s a perfect option for creators like us. I am a DIY kind of guy. I know how to typeset a book. I know how to create a cover that will look good on a book. The quality of Lulu’s printers is “nearly” indistinguishable from non POD printers. The only step I didn’t take was to become a full-fledged self-publisher, but I didn’t want to print X copies of a book and deal with the distribution of the novel. Lulu handles that for me, and I can concentrate on marketing and the podcast.
The negative? You can’t realistically get your book into bookstores, unless you have a relationship with the store. But is that really a negative, considering the niche nature of what we are writing? I don’t think so. Bookstores may not even exist twenty years from now. And recently I found out a fan got her favorite independent bookstore to put two copies of MAAH on their bookshelves. How cool is that?
HJ: That’s great! AH a “full voice cast” work, using fellow podcasters as voice actors. This seems to be something of a trend. How difficult is producing your “cast”? How much time do you spend on it? Will the rest of your works in the Caern series use this approach?
PGH: Ah, there’s the question of the year for me.
HJ: Figured you’d like that.
PGH: MAAH started as pretty much a straight read, but I had always planned on using sound effects, ambient sound, and music. I wanted to get two or three ladies to read some of the small female parts in the novel, but then more and more people started saying they wanted to take part.
Soon I had 30+ people doing voices for the novel. Producing MAAH as some sort of hybrid between novel and audio drama adds multiple layers of complexity. It is an organizational nightmare at times. I have to create all the scripts, send them out, get audio back, listen to the audio, ask for redos when necessary, etc.
Then there is the editing itself. Every guest voice per chapter adds at least an hour of work to the process. To give you an idea, here are some stats tied to a single episode:
* my recording - 2.5 hours
* editing my audio - 8 hours
* editing and splicing in guest audio - 3 hours
* foley work (including searching for certain effects I didn’t have) - 4.5 hours
* mixing down, listening for errors, uploading, etc. - 2 hours
HJ: All to yield a finished product of…?
PGH: So 20 hours to produce a 30-40 minute episode. Contrast this to Nathan Lowell, who takes around 2 hours to produce a 30-40 minute episode. And this does not cover the hours spent on organization.
So is it worth it? Oh, yes. I love the creative process behind this, and the promotional benefits of working with all the guest voices, most of whom are podcasters as well, has been great for me.
As for the next novel, there are eight speaking characters… could this be a direct result of going through this process with MAAH? Could be!
HJ: What’s the best part of podcasting your work? What’s the worst part?
PGH: I’ve pretty much answered this in the other questions. The best thing is that I have introduced myself and my writing to thousands of people… thousands more than would have ever read word one from me otherwise.
The other big positive is the podcasting community itself. The Tribe, as everyone calls us on Twitter, has been an awesome thing to watch. These people truly care about you and what you are going through, as a creator and as a person. And as a result of podcasting, I’ve become friends with some of the most creative people I’ve ever known.
The negative? Time. Because of the time I’ve spent on the podcast and its production, I have written very little over the last year, and I stress out when I can’t meet my self-imposed deadlines for the podcast. But in the end I wouldn’t have it any other way.
HJ: You mentioned here and on your blog that there will be more in Caern. How many more episodes do we have in MAAH and when might we see the next parts?
PGH: There will be 42 total episodes, although there are a couple of very long chapters that I might have to split, so the number could rise to 44. For reference, I’ve just released episode 26. I expect the podcast to last until the end of the year.
I expect to begin podcasting the next novel, right now with the working title “The House that Time Forgot,” three months after the end of MAAH.
HJ: Any projects in the interim to stay “on the radar”?
PGH: The only side project I had was the story I finished last week (which was the cause of this last release delay for MAAH). I wrote a short story (actually a long story, 7000+ words) for Matt Selznick that he read during his live video web-a-thon last Sunday. It was a lot of fun to write, and it was an honor to have the podcast author that convinced me that I was going to podcast MAAH read my contribution to his Sovereign universe.
HJ Religion plays a big part in the book, especially since one of the main character is a sort of monk. Talk to me about the pantheon and what your thoughts are regarding religion in your work.
PGH: I was a religious studies major in college and became fascinated with Hinduism. The stories about the Hindu pantheon and how they interacted with the world provided me a set of concepts that are part of my fantasy world. These “Children of Az” (Az being the creator god) interact directly with humanity, as mortals themselves (albeit very powerful mortals). Their very nature brought magic into the world. Their individual natures (different shards of the same mirror, one seen as the protector, another seen as the destroyer, another as the prophet, another as the trickster, etc.) affect how they act in the world, even if they desire different results.
But a quote from Frank Herbert forced me to refocus my perspective on these concepts:
“I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their critical judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?”
Twenty years ago when I began working on my setting, I had latched onto the idea of the end of an era, and how the gods living in the world were the cause of such an event (whether directly or indirectly). Now my focus isn’t on these immortals that have chosen to live mortal lives in order to affect events in the world, but on humanity’s responses to the actions of these “superheroes.” While we haven’t broached any of these ideas directly quite yet in MAAH, it is the overarching storyline that affects everything in Caern, even what has gone on in Avedon Hill. I look forward to getting to that part of the story very soon.
HJ: Thanks for your time PG! I look forward to hearing more from you.
July 20th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Splashy look