Podfic of Sam Starbuck's 'Cartographer's Craft'
I have no sense of proportion, I wanted to make my bff a present no one else would be ridiculous enough to make, and I needed something to stave off winter depression: this is the outcome. Lovingly beta-listened by Trojie.
Due to be posted in four 11-chapter parts. Which means it begins as a Christmas present 2015 and might just be finished by Christmas 2016. Merry Christmas, K!
Caveats, in addition to Sam's archive warning:
1. Fic for a British fandom, written by an American and read by an Australian. Dialect pedants beware.
1b. I'm not doing Special Voices, but Bowman was written with some kind of distinct accent in the original. I have no idea what Sam was aiming for, but I'm aiming for 'the guy who says nononoYES in the Vicar of Dibley' and... mostly missing it. When asked to produce an accent that isn't Australian or RP I roam the former Commonwealth, ransacking innocent dialects for vowels. Sorry guys. Apparently I occasionally ended up sounding like Trojie's grandfather, who was from Trinidad via Ireland, and like Bowman, loved mangoes. Feel free to imagine Bowman's life story...2. Should you happen to open the file and realise you recognise my voice because I am or have been your teacher... on your own head be it if you continue to listen.
3. Sound quality, in both the quality-as-value and quality-as-timbre varies a bit, especially in the first four chapters. It took me a while to get a decent mic and figure out how to use it, but, given how *impossibly enormous* this fic is, I was not inclined to re-record any more of it than absolutely necessary. Concrit welcome (especially if it comes with "here's how to fix this thing in Audacity") for the sake of the rest of the work, but bear in mind that in this, as many of my hobbies, I am trying to practice the art of "not being a ridiculous perfectionist".
Further credit where further credit is due: the music snippets are from the 2008 album 'The Whitlams & Sydney Symphony Live in Concert', a song called 'Keep the Light On'. As far as I can determine, that album is not available anywhere anymore, but the track can be purchased from the compilation Truth, Beauty and a Picture of You (iTunes). The original album version from 'Little Cloud' is currently up on youtube.
I would feel abashed by the music choice, but I'm not the one who wrote the plot device that deserves being associated with those lyrics. Besides, it could be worse, it could have been "Blue Caravan".
Update: now archived at the audiofic archive! Files here. They'll appear more slowly than the updates to this AO3 work, but if the googledrive links ever break, the audiofic archive copies will probably still work.
Part 1: Chapters 1-11 (link goes to a googledrive-hosted .zip file, inside which are MP3s)
Total time for part one: 4h 38 min. Each chapter is a track of 20-30 minutes.
Further updates will be posted as new "chapters" in this A03 work, so you can click "subscribe" to be notified.
A potted history of Cartographer's Craft:
As anyone watching me flail on Tumblr will have noticed, one of my favourite things about being a latecomer to fandom (relatively speaking) is piecing textual histories together. It's like medieval lit without the palaeography or codicology! Sam's work is particularly fun because the great journal hack of 08 means some of the "primary" evidence is actually reconstructions.
Lo, then, this is the history of Cartographer's Craft, pieced together from kayloulee's History Of Things Inept Missed In Potter Fandom, my own research, and testimony from the man himself:
Somewhere in late 04 or early 05 versions of the early chapters were posted. After the release of HBP they were systematically edited for canon-compliance, with new versions posted over about a week from 22nd June 05. The non-compliant versions are lost to the mists of time. The LJ posts from after the HBP release still survive, with their comments, and where one can discover that the fic was originally rated a mere PG.
Tumblr user darlinggirlpicklock added the data that the fic was originally finished somewhere in the holiday season 05-06, probably at christmas or new year. This means we're up on the 10-year anniversary now, so... happy ten year anniversary, Cartographer's Craft, I made you 1/4 of a podfic!
Some time after the great journal hack of 08, when Sam lost the corresponding posts on his personal journal, the text was moved to Dreamwidth, which is where I met it. The author's notes to ch 1 at Dreamwidth give some idea of the revision history, which doesn't appear on the A03 version (more details can be gleaned from the comments on the LJ versions of chs 1-6).
It's not evident from the post-HBP LJ posts where the transition between "revised version" and "written after HBP" is, but my money is on Chapter Six as the first entirely new chapter Sam wrote after reading HPB - that's the chapter where RAB is identified and the locket found. The chief change during revision was removing Snape from the early Order meetings; minor fixes included altering the relationship progression for Remus and Tonks, and adjusting the Harry/Ginny context. Some tantalising references in the comments on the now-compliant version's LJ posts suggest Harry may have once had a crush on Bill Weasley - that shows up later in the fic as a vague attraction but not exactly a plot point.
At some point, someone did make a podfic of at least part of Cartographer's Craft: both Sam and Kayloulee have told me it once existed and is now lost. I'm pretty sure it was lost by 2010, when I discovered the podfic of Stealing Harry: if there'd been a podfic of Cartographer's Craft I'd have gone straight on to that.
Sections of Cartographer's Craft deal with the non-existent book 'Animagus Winter', which eventually turned into Sam Starbuck's original novel Nameless, which is an excellent read in its own right. There's a post from 2014 at Sam's Wordpress Blog entitled "The Book that Saved My Life", which talks about that process.
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