Hey, guys. Things are even busier than usual for me, mainly due to the audiobooks (more on that below). I will be posting the next Angels & Gods episode, hopefully tomorrow and otherwise early Monday. This will be Episode 6: The Evergreen Shield.

So what's up with the audiobooks, and why are they keeping me so busy? No, I'm not recording or editing them myself. 😉 I have a pro studio taking care of that.

Over the course of the next year, I'll be getting about half of my catalogue of books into audio (others books will come later). We're doing full-cast immersive audio.

Paragons 1 & 2 and Phoenix Dynasty 1 & 2 are already in production. They're be done in the next few months.

Legion of Angels (complete series: 13 books) and Immortal Legacy (complete series: 3 books) are in pre-production.

For full-cast immersive audiobooks, you can't use the book text as-is. They require scripts, or the flow is terrible. Trust me, I've tried it with just the book text, and it doesn't work at all.

This means I need to turn all the books into scripts. I am doing this personally in order to preserve the integrity of the books. These are mostly minor modifications like cutting superfluous dialogue tags (he said, she said, etc.), which you don't need when there are different actors voicing different characters. In fact, you don't want them, particularly in my books which have fast-paced banter; the tags break the flow.

The problem is time. This doesn't take as much time as writing a new book obviously, but it does take time. And writing a script is a different skill and way of thinking from writing a novel.

Legion of Angels alone is something around 1.1 million words. That means I need to go through 1.1 million words of book text and covert it into scripts. Twice. Once to modify and once to check the flow with the modifications and make any necessary changes.

Immortal Legacy, for which I already completed the scripts, is another couple hundred thousand words. I also wrote 3 new bonus stories to go along with the series in preparation for the audiobooks.

The Paragons and Phoenix Dynasty books are generally ~80k-90k words per book, and there are 4 of them currently in production. They sound awesome so far, btw.

As you can see, all the time spent on writing scripts really adds up. I also have a lot of actor auditions to listen to. Legion of Angels alone has over 300 characters. The production studio is helping a lot with the casting, but I do need to listen to and decide on the important characters myself in order to give you guys the best possible audiobooks. There are a lot of important characters in LoA.

And I need to listen to the edits of the audiobooks, often several times as changes are made. Immersive audiobooks are much more involved than a simple reading, but they will be amazing.

In summary: these audiobooks are getting a lot of TLC from the author. 😊

So if you're wondering why I sometimes fall into a blackhole of work or I'm otherwise kind of slow to finish some projects at the moment, this is why.

Thanks for all your patience!

❤️ Ella