Hounded. Haunted. Hunted. She is the most important person in the world. She is The Key.

In the ancient Turkish city of Ruin, American journalist Liv Adamsen lies in an isolation ward staring at walls as blank as her memory.

She knows she entered the monumental Citadel at the heart of Ruin but can remember only darkness. Something strange is stirring within her, whispering that she is ‘the key’. But the key to what?

For the Ghost, a mercenary operating in the Syrian Desert, Liv could unlock one of mankind’s most potent secrets. For the brotherhood in the Citadel – now cursed by a terrible plague – her return may secure the mountain and ensure their survival. And for a powerful faction in Rome, she threatens the very future of the Catholic Church.

Hunted across continents and caught up in events that defy explanation, Liv turns to the only person she trusts – a charity worker named Gabriel Mann. Together their paths lead to a shocking discovery – one that will tear them apart and change the world forever…

Iran in 1576 is a place of wealth and dazzling beauty. But when the Shah dies without having named an heir, the court is thrown into tumult. Princess Pari, the Shah’s daughter and protégé, knows more about the inner workings of the state than almost anyone, but the princess’s maneuvers to instill order after her father’s sudden death incite resentment and dissent. Pari and her closest adviser, Javaher, a eunuch able to navigate the harem as well as the world beyond the palace walls, are in possession of an incredible tapestry of secrets and information that reveals a power struggle of epic proportions.

Based loosely on the life of Princess Pari Khan Khanoom, Equal of the Sun is a riveting story of political intrigue and a moving portrait of the unlikely bond between a princess and a eunuch. Anita Amirrezvani is a master storyteller, and in her lustrous prose this rich and labyrinthine world comes to vivid life with a stunning cast of characters, passionate and brave men and women who defy or embrace their destiny in a Machiavellian game played by those who lust for power and will do anything to attain it.

For Laurence and Temeraire, put out to pasture in Australia, it seems their part in the war has come to an end just when they are needed most. But perhaps they are no longer alone in this opinion. Newly allied with the powerful African empire of the Tswana, the French have occupied Spain and brought revolution and bloodshed to Brazil, threatening Britain’s last desperate hope to defeat Napoleon.

And now the government that sidelined them has decided they have the best chance at negotiating a peace with the angry Tswana, who have besieged the Portuguese royal family in Rio—and thus offer to reinstate Laurence to his former rank and seniority as a captain in the Aerial Corps. Temeraire is delighted by this sudden reversal of fortune, but Laurence is by no means sanguine, knowing from experience that personal honor and duty to one’s country do not always run on parallel tracks.

Nonetheless, the pair embark for Brazil, only to meet with a string of unmitigated disasters that force them to make an unexpected landing in the hostile territory of the Incan empire, where they face new unanticipated dangers.

Now with the success of the mission balanced on a razor’s edge, and failure looking more likely by the minute, the unexpected arrival of an old enemy will tip the scales toward ruin. Yet even in the midst of disaster, opportunity may lurk—for one bold enough to grasp it.

I’ve mentioned my maternal Grandfather before now in these pages, but just recently his own type-written report of the incident turned up in a university library in Australia after an internet search.  It runs to eight pages and I thought I would like to share it with a wider audience – I found it so extraordinary to read and I present it here in it’s entirety (about 25 minutes).  I hope you find the time to listen through as it gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of what it must have been like to risk life and limb on the high seas during the height of World War II.

The ‘MV’ of MV Port Victor stands for ‘Motor Vessel’.  She had only been completed the year before, having been built in 1942 in the Wallsend shipyards of Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson. She was 12,441 tons in weight and, as far as I can make out from internet records, of the 200+ merchant vessels sunk by the Germans in 1943 there were only four heavier. If you are interested click on the following link to find more details and the map location of the sinking at the bottom of the page: http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?37354

Some years ago I remember my mother showing me the photograph my Grandfather mentions, taken by the Liberator’s crew of their lifeboats roped together, in a frame alongside the handwritten note scribbled in pencil by the American crew of that plane and sent down with the supplies.  It exists somewhere in our family’s collection of memorabilia, but quite where at this moment we are not sure – it is being looked for…

A couple of weeks after reaching dry land my Grandfather wrote to the parents of a couple of young female Dutch passengers – I present that letter below.  I love his turn of phrase: ‘To the feminine virtues of beauty and grace they added intelligence and “savoir faire” to a remarkable degree in girls so young’.

I am adding this paragraph after the initial publication of this blog as my brother has succeeded in finding more material relevant to our Grandfather’s career – below is a newspaper report (from the Tasmanian Examiner, of all papers!) on the visit of King George VI and the Queen to the newly launched Port Brisbane in 1949 – Commodore WG Higgs commanding:

To say I am proud to be a part of a family that contains such a wonderful man as my Grandfather is understating it. My only regret, and I have said this before, is that he died when I was only 9 months old.  Here’s a picture of my Grandfather with my Grandmother and her sister taken in 1948 - 5 years after the events mentioned here.  It’s said my Grandmother’s hair turned white overnight on hearing that her husband’s ship had gone down.

My thanks go to Elizabeth Drew in Australia for bringing these documents to our attention, my brother who emailed them to me from the UK (and found the cutting used above in the National Library of Australia) and my cousin Graham (also in Australia) for the 1948 photo. Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing!

Take Care
Simon

Now, why should this be so?  Probably because I’m a bit of a geek and am unreasonably excited about being a small part of something so much larger than I’m usually involved in.  This project goes by the name “JOHN CARTER”.  It is a movie… directed by a two time Oscar winner… it supposedly cost $250 million dollars to make… and I have a line in it!

Over the years, first lines (only lines) have become quite important to me.  In Grammar School in the UK at about age 12 I took part in my first school play.  It was Julius Caesar and my line (my only line) was “Sirrah, give place”.  I have no idea why it has stuck in my mind for so many years, but there you have it; like that first kiss, that first taste of a really fine malt whisky, the first time… well, you get the idea.  This line is uttered by the character Publius, a Senator, not far into Act 3 Sc 1. As I look at the original text I see Publius has other lines in the play but I know this was all I uttered in our production, so the rest must have been cut.  Not an auspicious beginning.

Back to ‘John Carter’: After the movie had been ‘put together’ (I’m not good with technical terms) the director screened it several times to spot anything that needed improving and amongst several other little tweaks (more on one of those later) the director felt that a line as uttered by one of the minor characters just didn’t sound right in the context of the movie and they needed it replaced (I heard the original later – the actor had a strong Irish accent).  Word went out and through my agent I was asked to send in a sample recording. Oh, I was ON it.  Fortunately so.  I heard later that I was hired because I was the first actor to supply anything that matched the original actor’s voice. A few days later I traveled to Marin County and entered the world of big movie making at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch.

Now, thirty or so years after asking ‘Sirrah’ to ‘give place’ (this is another flashback) I landed a spot in my first TV show, Nash Bridges.  This was Don Johnson’s vehicle being filmed locally in San Francisco.  I was hired for the episode “Out of Chicago” as a hotel concierge.  Talk about anticipation!  Over the next couple of weeks I must have received a script update at least once a week FedEx’d to my house… a full script each time… and each time I still had only one line, and it NEVER changed.  I must have run that one line through my head a thousand times… was I getting the emphasis right, was I using the right tone of voice?  I knew that one line backwards, sideways and upside down.

Finally came the day of filming, at a hotel in downtown San Francisco.  I was ready for anything.  The director called for a rehearsal… I waited for the female character to come to my desk and ask the question that was my cue and I gave my best line reading EVAH.  For weeks I had had the line in my head and I was not going to get it wrong.  I was PERFECT.  Then the director came over… and changed the line.  Just like that.  At the last minute.  But… I’m a professional and I handled it.  I can still recite that one line from memory: “There’s another stand on the plaza. Through those doors, ma’am.”  Awesome.

Here’s the snippet:

At Skywalker Ranch,  in January of this year, in a small room off a small corridor, off a longer corridor, off the huge reception area (it’s a bit labyrinthine) I was shown the few seconds of the movie in which my reading of the line would be inserted in place of the original actor’s.  We practiced a little and then Andrew Stanton (the  director of the Oscar winning movies ‘Finding Nemo’ and ‘Wall-E’) came into the room and gave some direction. The actor was crouching to his knee as the line was spoken and I had to imitate his movement so that the sound was authentic on screen. We recorded several takes and that was it!  Since they had to be sure it all went together well I was asked to hang about while the work was done and it was suggested I might like to sit at the back of the much larger mixing studio and watch as some other part of the movie was being worked on.  Being in this mixing studio was like being present at NASA during some crucial phase of the moon landing… it was amazing.

The studio (the Kurosawa studio) had just been refurbished at a cost of a million dollars or so and it was, is, truly impressive.  It’s about the size of a small movie theatre with banks of NASA-like desks and monitors in rows facing the screen.  It’s here that sound effects and music and … oh I don’t know, so much of what gets put in a movie gets put in.  I watched as a 35″ clip of a sequence of JOHN CARTER was run over and over as they tried to balance a background sound effect with the music score.  They were tweaking the tiniest detail, something that would blow by the audience’s ear in a second, but they know that it’s the attention to detail that can make all the difference.

At the time of writing, the critics have not been kind to JOHN CARTER.  I’m going to take the family to see it tonight and I shall conclude this particular blog, after I get back, with my verdict … on my line AND the movie – I may even tell you roughly where in the movie my line is heard…

********* Several hours later**********

Hey! That was FUN!

No, it’s not a great movie (if it won Mr.Stanton a third Oscar I’d be very surprised) but as a piece of escapist entertainment I’d say it was pretty darn good and at times it is that wonderful cliche a ‘visual feast’.  It occasionally stretched believability (what SciFi/superhero movie doesn’t) but no more than, say, a Tarzan movie might. I mention Tarzan because the author of that series was also the author of the John Carter series of novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs.  So you have to bear in mind the origins of this tale… It’s a Saturday matinee serial writ large.  I’m a big kid at heart so for me it was, without a doubt, worth the cost of admission.

My line in the movie?  Right towards the end… and it was brilliantly done. That’s all I’m saying.

Take Care
Simon

I’m choosing this topic for my first blog on the re-designed “me” website because yesterday I donated some time in support of Learning Ally’s Record-A-Thon (the organization formerly known as “Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic”) and had a wonderful morning down at their studios in Palo Alto which made me recall the many pleasant hours I spent at the Royal National Institute for the Blind’s Talking Book Service (now more than 75 years old) in London in the 1980′s.  I always say it’s where I served my apprenticeship in audiobook narration.

Back then I was at the BBC working a very strange shift pattern as a newsreader/presenter for Radio 4 that left me with time off during the week and as I was new to London I was still looking for things to do in my spare time.  A friend had recorded a few books for the RNIB (whose Talking Books studios were just around the corner from Broadcasting House, the BBC’s headquarters) so I volunteered and that was it, I was hooked.  For the next 10 years I must have recorded scores of books in short 3 hour sessions once a week (including my first recording of Frank Herbert’s DUNE canon – all five books took me about a year).

Here’s how it worked then: One engineer sat between two soundproof studios and listened in to each in turn.  We, the narrators, would record continuously and if we stumbled and the engineer was not listening to us we would first have to get their attention.  Then they would rewind the tape and at a suitable gap (prior to where we stumbled) the engineer would ‘drop’ us back into the recording.  I recall there were green and red lights on the desks in front of us and they put the green up for standby and the red when we were to start (come to think about it, it may have been the other way round!).  Nowadays I work alone in a studio and do all the work myself – while some narrators still practice the ‘drop in’ method of picking up after stumbles I prefer to record straight through, dropping markers when I need to, and editing the mistakes afterwards.

The Learning Ally studios are shown on the right – they look like a set of experimental boxes in a futuristic SciFi movie – you’re never quite sure if what emerges will be what went inside to begin with…

Yesterday I had to learn a whole new system because for that book I actually had to say the name of the page I was on and pause both before and after.  At the same time the engineer would click on a screen and highlight an icon indicating that page… and at the end of that page there’d be a pause, I’d say “Page two seventeen”, another pause while the engineer clicked the ’217′ icon, and then on I’d go.  Certainly not the same as recording a commercial audiobook.  I’m sure this has to do with allowing the person listening to be able to easily find their way through the book.

I must mention the person who brought my attention to this organization and first invited me down to donate a few hours to the cause: Anne Richardson.  She’s someone who (like me) started recording for the blind and partially sighted and has since moved on to commercial audiobooks.  She’s still just starting (with only a few audiobooks out there) but she’s put a lot of effort into expanding this part of her career and promises to do well.  What I find admirable is that she still donates at least an afternoon a week to working down at Learning Ally studios.  If you find yourself able to then please do your part and donate to the cause.

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In a side note our peach tree produced it’s first blossom of the year today and I wanted to share it with you.

We have two apple trees, one pear and the peach all of which have been planted in the last 2 years.  We had a couple of delicious apples last year, but the late rains knocked all the blossoms off the peach tree and it gave us no fruit – but then, we’re told, it probably wouldn’t have been that good since the tree was so young.

We’re hoping for a better result this year.

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Finally, I hope you like the new format of the website.  It requires me to go back over many of the past posts and adjust them for the new style and that’s very time consuming, but I’m trying to do that over the next few months.  I really like the much more simple framework and hope you do to.

Take Care
Simon

Addendum:  Since writing this the subject of volunteering as a narrator has come up in other social media outlets, and from a LinkedIn discussion I offer these two suggestions for places people can volunteer (it’s a great way to begin training yourself in long form narration).  One is in Minnesota: http://www.positivelyminnesota.com/JobSeekers/Blind_or_Visually_Impaired/Donate_or_Volunteer/Support_Us_by_Volunteering_2.aspx and the other in LA: http://www.airsla.org/volunteer.asp – I’m not sure if they also accept donations.