Fighting For Our Right To Party

[zvi]

So, I am not actually directing you to go talk to people in an anon meme, but there's a long discussion about posting a story podfic first, text delayed, in the Inception anon meme on LJ.

It raises a few interesting questions which you might care to discuss.

Some questions:

1) How do you convince people to give podfic a try, if they don't intuitively grasp why it might be cool?
2) If a story only ever gets posted as podfic, are you keeping something from people who prefer text?
3) What are the arguments for and against simultaneous release of podfic and text versus podfic first release?
4) How do you present the idea to people of a staggered release without annoying them? How do you let the people who didn't want to listen to the audio that the text is finally available?
5) If a story is released podfic first, is that first podfic of it the canonical version of the text?
6) How do you write a story to be read?

Comments

[klb]

Would it eventually be archived in its standard form on the AO3 or a similar site?

I am thinking yes, after a month it would be posted and archived like normal? Like, that might step on the point we were making a little bit, but I think it would be unfair to the author to ask them not to do that. And as you say, long-term archiving potential is a consideration as well.

Re: the writing being different, I suppose authors and podficcers would need to experiment a bit to get a feel for that. This gets into question 6 above. I could see it being written as a monologue, which would look different than most fics (at least because few fics I see these days are first-person). Or perhaps more like a notfic than a normal fic—I just made a podfic of a notfic, and it did feel in some ways much more natural to speak aloud (with the exception of the emoticons). Or would it look different from either of those two? Either way, I don't think it would be radically different from at least some of the fics out there, because fics cover such a wide range of styles and a lot of fics already have a really strong sense of voice and rhythm, which is part of what makes podficcing such a fun hobby.

Anyway, half of the point of this challenge that a friend and I are planning to run is to explore the answer to that question: what does a podfic script look like, and how is it different from a normal fic?

[naraht]

I would certainly like to try writing one someday. One of my favorite fandoms is a radio play and it was actually hard for me to shift formats and write fic about it. Might be far easier to write for podfic.

(Personally I think I'd dive in and go straight for script format.)

[luzula]

Just a question: what is a notfic? *curious*

[klb]

Notfic is like when someone tells out a story that would be fic, but they're not really *writing* it like they would if they did it properly. It tends to be more conversational, more like oral storytelling, sometimes uses chatspeak and emoticons and stuff. I just made a podfic of a notfic and it was really fun to perform.