A collection of poems with audiobook included: I threw a stone by @Oscar_Sparrow
Oscar Sparrow was born in 1949 as the sonic boom of jets and babies began to draw a new world map of umbilical vapour trails. He was brought up on cod liver oil and National Health orange juice. As the colour red leached its way out of the map of the British Empire, Oscar attended a die-hard Church school designed to create noble savages to serve what was left of the savage Nobles. The Eleven Plus exam revealed that he could not even count to eleven and he became a mechanic, labourer, truck driver, boxer and poet. He read Wordsworth and Ford Cortina manuals in a lorry cab near both Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
Eventually he found himself in London where he joined the Metropolitan Police. Car chases and riots followed but he did not take it personally. He spent his spare time touring the Art galleries, singing Piaf and learning French and Italian. Eventually The Authorities fell for the con and gave him a desk job in the Art department of Interpol London at Scotland Yard. Throughout all this time he was a would be poet, short story writer and novelist.
To Oscar, poetry is the spoken word. A free, downloadable, 45 minute MP3 audio book of these poems, read by the author, is included.
A little from the author
This is a video trailer for my poetry collection which was released on Amazon Kindle in December 2011. I believe that poetry should be spoken - so my book comes with a 45 minute MP3 download of me reading the poems so that they can be heard as well as being read (you can actually play the audio file on a Kindle whilst reading). As a result of this, the video trailer includes the audio recoding of the title poem 'I threw a stone' and also a musical accompaniment - a piece inspired by the poem and played by a young musician that I know.
The video is just over 2 minutes long and includes information about the poetry collection - as well as details of how to purchase.
I wanted the video to convey a sense of relaxation and calm - in the hope that this will be the effect readers will gain from taking time out of the jingle-jangle lives we lead to experience my poems.
I had some assistance from a friend in pulling this video together - as my computer software skills do not run to this level.
The book is due out in paperback in the next few weeks (via CreateSpace) so I will need to update the video in the next few days!
The video footage was filmed at a local beach (Christchurch Bay, UK) on a fairly old digital camera with a video facility. The man in the shot is me and my partner took the video one sunny but cold day in winter.
The vocal audio track was made using a microphone with a pop screen attached to my laptop in a makeshift 'recording studio' (a corner of my bedroom with curtains shut and lots of cushions to deaden the sound). It was recorded using Audacity - a free software program for MAC or PC. The same microphone was used to record the pianist on her family piano. The two tracks were then mixed together on Audacity to make the soundtrack for the video.
The photos used are album shots of the cover of my book and we created some text slides for the information about Amazon and the MP3 download.
We used One True Media to create the video - there is a charge for this product. We used Audacity (free software) for the sound mixing of the audiotrack.
Check out the author's site HERE.
