My First Podcast! "The Morandini Genie" is Live at Cast of Wonders

I just had the fantastic experience of listening to someone else (Graeme Dunlop, to be precise) read one of my stories aloud. "The Morandini Genie" is today's entry from the Cast of Wonders podcast site. I'm very impressed with the presentation. The art on the webpage is neat and Dunlop did a fantastic job of characterizing and dramatizing the piece.

Longtime readers of my blog may recall that this story was originally the first entry in my (very short lived) "Call and Response Flash Fiction" contest/challenge where I opened the floor to readers to provide prompts for me to write a flash fiction based upon. I would pick my favorite, award the winner $5, and then write a story based on the prompt. David Powers King was the first winner of the contest with his prompt:

"A child finds a candlestick in the gutter on her way home from school."

David was thrilled with the story which I came up with from his prompt and I was very pleased when the Cast of Wonders folks said that they enjoyed it, too, and wanted to run it as a podcast.

And I've also learned something from my first podcast experience -- if you're doing a podcast with potentially-unfamiliar names, it might be good to make sure the pronunciation is clear to the podcaster! Graeme's intro mentions different potential ways of pronouncing "Morandini" depending on if you're from the UK, US, or Australia. The rhyming nature of the title provided the needed hint. Alas, I didn't rhyme "Jeter" (as in "Derek Jeter") with anything, so his name comes out rhyming with "sitter" rather than "Peter." It didn't disrupt my enjoyment of the piece, and -- like I said -- a good lesson learned! After all, I hope to have more podcasts in my future.

I hope that you enjoy listening to the piece if you click over. It's under ten minutes and, hey, here in the US it's a long weekend so finding a spare ten minutes shouldn't be too hard.

Enjoy the weekend and if you are traveling, be safe.