Dedric Mauriac: Episode number 20, The Dreamers Thread.

Dedric Mauriac: Starla Huchton, the author of the Dreamers Thread novel. So tell me a little bit about yourself. Who are you?

Starla Huchton: I’m a writer, obviously. A podcaster, mother, wife, veteran, kind of a lot of different things.

Dedric Mauriac: Alright, so you’ve written this novel. Can you give us a brief background on how it started out and who the main character is?

Starla Huchton: Well, the main premise for the novel is it’s about a 25-year-old tattoo artist who lives in Seattle. Her life takes a turn for the strange when she becomes sucked into the dream world and discovers that she has the powers to create dreams. She’s then told that she has to combat the forces of evil and drive out the creatures from the nightmare realm. So that’s the basic premise of the novel. Right.

Dedric Mauriac: So where can we find the novel?

Starla Huchton: The novel can be found on iTunes or on podiobooks.com or at the website which is The Dreamers Thread novel.com. I kind of remember the name of my own website.

Dedric Mauriac: That’s alright. So what gave you the idea to actually take it and sterilize it into a podcast?

Starla Huchton: Well that was actually the idea of the audio producer for the novel. I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a podiobook out there. This was a friend of mine, Jamie Jordan, and he read the book and he’s like, you know, I’ve done this other work. You should check this out. This is what I would like to do with your novel. He introduced me to Merlafferty’s Playing for Keeps, which is the other serialized audiobook that he did.

He produced the audio for that one as well. So I listened to that and I listened to a I decided that was the route that I wanted to go with mine. I thought it would be very entertaining, kind of, you know, a different route into getting the story out there and sharing it with other people.

Dedric Mauriac: So what was it like to work with all of those voice actors?

Starla Huchton: Well, that was an adventure in and of itself. It’s a lot of work doing a full cast production, which especially for a first time podcast, you know, author like myself, this was my first podcast ever.

And I guess I decided, you know, go big or go home. So a lot of a lot of work went into finding the right voices. I listened to a lot of podcasts and just looked at a lot of different people for different things and sent out a lot of emails and begged and pleaded. And fortunately, most of those folks were kind enough to loan their talented voices to the story. So I was very, very lucky.

Dedric Mauriac: All right. So how long did it actually take you to get all those people together and from start to finish to get the novel into audio?

Starla Huchton: Well, there is a few times that it would be like the week before an episode was to go out and I discovered that I was missing a voice. It’s at that point that you kind of go, oh, whoops, and you scramble and you throw yourself at the mercy of anybody that you know that might fit the part. And again, I was lucky enough that I got some great people to help me in those situations.

Dedric Mauriac: Yeah, I’ve heard some of your episodes actually had a long list of people just for one episode.

Starla Huchton: I think one of the episodes in particular had 12 cast members. So yeah, it was quite a bit of work to do that. I think I started sending out emails for casting and things at the end of June 2009 and the first episode went live August 22nd. So there’s a lot of time in there just gathering audio and casting folks and I had to kind of arrange the release schedule around certain people that weren’t going to be able to provide audio until such and such date just because their schedules didn’t allow it. So it’s a lot of work to try to coordinate all those different voices. And what’s really interesting about it is that I have people from all over the world that are involved in the cast. I’ve got, I think at least two folks from New Zealand are in the cast, Philippa Ballantyne and Dan Raybarts are both New Zealanders. So they’re both, I’ve got Canadians in it. I’ve got a little bit of everything.

Dedric Mauriac: Yeah, there was a wide variety of people that I heard in there with different characters and stuff. Do you actually hear from your readers that much?

Starla Huchton: Actually I do, especially the last 24 to 48 hours have been kind of a little bit of a surge in that because I just, I dropped the final episode of the podcast on Sunday, this past Sunday, which was the 31st of January. And it seems that as soon as that last episode dropped, I suddenly was getting all this feedback from people via Twitter and also via emails and I was getting Facebook messages, comments on the website. So it’s actually, I’ve gotten a lot more feedback just from finishing it than I did for the most of the time that it was, it ran, that it was going live.

Dedric Mauriac: Right. What actually inspired you to write this story?

Starla Huchton: Well to be honest, I really don’t know. I had an idea that I was starting out with and it went in a completely different direction and it really just kind of wrote itself in a way. The story just went on its own and I really, I have no idea how it happened. It just did.

Dedric Mauriac: Now the novel covers a lot about dreams and such and are any of your own dreams actually in the novel?

Starla Huchton: Actually, there’s quite a few of them. I just, I’ll mention little bits here and there and you probably wouldn’t know unless I told you specifically, but there’s one scene where she’s describing this ceiling that she’s looking at and it’s got depictions of different dreams that supposedly she’s had and there’s actually some dreams that I’ve described there that I’ve had. So I took a little bit from that, but there’s definitely a lot of me in the novel. That’s for sure.

Dedric Mauriac: Now, I also noticed that you actually liked knitting and I was wondering if that has something to do with the title of the novel?

Starla Huchton: No, actually I didn’t take up knitting until after the book had already been written and the title of it was actually the last thing that got done with the book. It was titled something else completely. I think I had titled it The Dream King, but I didn’t really like it because it didn’t seem to reflect the book quite like I wanted to. And somebody, actually my husband suggested, what about the dreamer’s thread? Which is it’s multipurpose in the title.

Dedric Mauriac: Yeah, it’s the Dream King would be a little bit too masculine in a sense I would think.

Starla Huchton: Yeah, and it doesn’t, well when I started writing it, that’s what I was calling it and it didn’t go as I thought it would, which would be to originally, you know, the story would be based around the kingdom, the land of dreams and the story was completely not that at all. So I did feel the need to change it and like I said, that was probably the last addition to the novel was the name change. Right.

Dedric Mauriac: One of the things I noticed that really added so much emotion to the story would be your choice of music with the different episodes that introduced the novel. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Starla Huchton: Well, actually that took me weeks to find just the perfect song for the, just to fit the podcast. And originally I wasn’t looking for anything with words. You know, I thought you know, something instrumental would do the trick. And when I heard Natalie Walker’s Waking Dream and I heard the opening, the opening of that song that has like the music box going in and it just, it struck such a chord with me. And then she starts singing and she’s got to do so wonderful voice and the lyrics to compliment the story so well. It was just, it was just a perfect fit. So I listened to it once and I just, I knew that was it. Right.

Dedric Mauriac: Now, you’re a singer yourself as well, right?

Starla Huchton: I am. I dabble. I actually, I’m a performer in second life, but not so much anymore. There was a point where I was doing shows every day, sometimes twice a day, but now I’m down to about maybe one a month. So I don’t do that so much anymore. But yes, I am a singer myself.

Dedric Mauriac: All right. Speaking of second life, were there any things in second life that are also in the book, such as the dresses that she actually imagines or the places that she goes to visit?

Starla Huchton: Well, not so much places and things as the people. I took a lot of inspiration from when I was writing the course of two different national novel writing months. And I took a lot of inspiration from the people that I was writing with in second life. And yourself happened to be one of those.

Right. That I didn’t actually, I didn’t see you that when the month that I finished the book, so which would have been, 2008 was when I finished it. You went around for that NaNoWriMo. But I took my inspiration for the wizard Dedric, I stole your name and the way that you look. There’s a couple of other folks in Second Life that, of course, totally got permission from people to kind of name or the way their avatars looked. Things like that.

Dedric Mauriac: I frankly remember you asking and I believe we were all writing about dreams because my novel back in 2007 was also about dreams as well. It seemed to be the going topic.

Starla Huchton: Yeah, I seem to remember that was a common theme that year. But yeah, I came to a point where I needed a name for a wizard and I looked around it because I believe it was a write-in that we were at. We were a whole bunch of us sitting around and you happened to pop in and go, Dedric, that’s a good name. So Dedric became the wizard.

Dedric Mauriac: Right. What does your family think about the book?

Starla Huchton: Well my kids actually asked to listen to the podcast. They’re always wanting to listen to mommy’s story, which I think is great. I’m fine with it because the novel is not, it doesn’t have a lot of adult themes.

So nothing is in it that I feel uncomfortable sharing with them. My husband was a little bit skeptical that I would finish it. Well, I was skeptical that I would finish it. But when I finally did, he was like, okay, okay, they’re very much behind the book and they’re very much behind the podcast and they all think it’s great. My in-laws still have no idea what a podcast is. They think it’s very strange.

Dedric Mauriac: Well, on that note, do you think there will be an actual print version of the book?

Starla Huchton: I am actually working on edits right now. Another round of edits. This is about the third version. So not too many changes, just some wording changes. There’s a lot of passive voice and a lot of adverbs I’m getting rid of. But I’m actually working on those edits so that I can set up a print copy for folks that do want it. Because I have been requested to set up something on Lulu or Create Space, where it’s a print on demand kind of thing. I also would like to set it up as an e-book because there’s a lot of folks out there that that’s getting real popular with. So we’re going to set it up like for Kindle and things like that.

Dedric Mauriac: I know a Kindle person who I would recommend it to, but she doesn’t listen to podcasts though.

Starla Huchton: No, she doesn’t know what she’s missing.

Dedric Mauriac: One of the things I noticed was the cover of the book. Is that a drawing that you drew yourself or did you get help with that?

Starla Huchton: No, actually the cover was done by me. It’s a combination of digital artwork and a hand drawing, which I don’t draw real well, but I’m actually in school right now to become a graphic designer. So I decided to go ahead and do the artwork myself. So the basic outline for the person that’s on the cover, I hand drew that and then filled it in with different textures from different photographs of the sky actually.

There’s Northern Lights, there’s a sunset, there’s a cloudy, hazy kind of sky. I thought it seemed like that worked very well, but it kind of looks like stained glass. So that was a cool effect too, but in the background there’s also other things that could be pulled from this story. There’s a castle there and there’s a ship and stormy seas and things like that. Those are sort of elements from the book that I tried to include on the cover.

Dedric Mauriac: It seems like you’ve had your hand into many different aspects from the beginning all the way to full productionist thing.

Starla Huchton: Well, that’s kind of the nature of the beast there, especially if you look at other podcasts, they’re mostly done. I was actually very lucky to have somebody do the audio production for me that I didn’t actually have to do that part myself. So I got to give major props to Jamie Jordan, who’s actually also in Second Life as Jay Wills Carver. He did a fantastic job with some audio that sometimes was not the greatest quality, but he did a great, great job on weaving it all together and trying to make it sound fairly consistent throughout. All right.

Dedric Mauriac: Can we expect to see a part two to this book?

Starla Huchton: Well, I don’t know when because I don’t want to put a timeline on it, but I am actually working on a second novel in this series. I’m actually working on two different projects right now. One is a sort of sequel to The Dreamer’s Thread, and the second one, which I’ve got quite a bit written on, is a steampunk novel.

So that one’s a completely different story, has nothing to do with The Dreamer’s Thread. It was kind of my chance to get out of that world for a little while, just kind of take a little break from it and get my hands into something else. So, but a sequel is sort of in the works, but I don’t want to put a timeline on it because I have no idea when it will be finished, and I don’t want people to be expecting it like, you know, next month when in reality it would probably be more like summer at the very, very earliest.

Dedric Mauriac: Well, you could probably get it done in two more nanorimos. Yeah, just another year. Oh, yeah. What would you have any advice for other people who are thinking about, you know, writing a novel or trying to convert novels to potty-o books or serialized podcasts?

Starla Huchton: Well, as far as the writing goes, the most important thing to do is just to write it first, and then the second most important part is to have other sets of eyes read your work and make sure you’ve got it’s just little things like grammar and spelling, and that’s not too important. The spelling part isn’t too important when it comes to podcasting it, but definitely for the actual writing it is the hardest thing to do is just to write the thing and have the finished product.

So if you can do that, you’re already way ahead of the game. As far as creating a podcast from your work, the biggest thing that I would tell people is to listen to lots of other podcasts and see how other people are doing it, figure out what works, what doesn’t, what you would like to see from yours, and set goals for yourself as far as that goes and don’t sell your work short. Because the better quality of podcasts that you get, the more listeners that you’re going to get and the more people are going to want to stay with your podcast and continue listening to your work.

Dedric Mauriac: That’s really great. What would you say was your most enjoyable part about this whole project?

Starla Huchton: Well, as far as the podcast goes, I have to say that it’s just got to be meeting and interacting with so many other wonderful people during the casting process and the promotional process. I’ve gotten to meet some really, really entertaining folks and just really smart and really know their stuff and that it helped me out immensely just with learning things about the whole podcasting world and just little tricks here and there. I’ve gotten involved with other podcasts, done a few voices here and there. I’ve actually helped contribute some music to, I contributed a little vocal work to Alex White’s, the Gear Heart podcast.

So you can hear a little bit of my vocal stylings on that podcast. But that’s probably been the most enjoyable part of this whole thing and getting the feedback too. There’s nothing like hearing getting an email from some random person saying how much they’re enjoying your book and when is the next episode coming out or when is the sequel coming out? Do you have any other projects going on? It’s just that kind of stuff that just makes me smile. All right.

Dedric Mauriac: Well, is there any closing comments you would like to make before we end this interview?

Starla Huchton: Well, nothing really comes to mind except I hope folks enjoy the book. I hope they check it out and I hope they really enjoy it. All right.

Dedric Mauriac: Well, it’s been nice having you on the interview.

Starla Huchton: Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Dedric Mauriac: The song Waking Dream by Natalie Walker is available on Music Alley from Mēvio and without further ado, here’s the Waking Dream.

Natalie Walker: I’ll walk it. I’ll come back to my mess.

Dedric Mauriac: A great dream.