It’s possible to have too much excitement, and here on the Footsteps on the Mountain blog it certainly feels like we’ve been pushing at the boundaries of delirium recently. Last week I teamed up with fellow mountain writer and Amazon bestseller John D Burns to bring you a gripping excerpt from my first book Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest.
How do we top that? It seems improbable but this week we’ve gone a step further. Not only has John recorded an excerpt from my second book Feet and Wheels to Chimborazo, but we’ve also done a short interview about it.
John’s podcast is entitled Outside In, a name he came up with before the coronavirus outbreak which has suddenly become staggeringly appropriate.
In this interview we talk about the volcanoes of Ecuador, why Chimborazo is a special mountain and how Edita and I ended up doing our Chimborazo sea-to-summit challenge, the subject of my book. John finishes the podcast by reading an extract from the book, featuring a section from one of our ascents of Chimborazo.
Ecuadorian place names aren’t the easiest to pronounce, but John is a consummate professional. He breezes over the syllables and you’ll be amazed by the ease with which his voice flits across such names as the Veintittittimilla summit.
And if you’re intrigued to know more, do please consider buying the book here. Lockdown or no lockdown, it’s a breezy, entertaining read that is guaranteed to cheer you up wherever you may be.
I spoke a little about John’s writing in last week’s blog post. We’ve both been working with audio a bit more recently. Unlike myself, who has no background in the performance arts, John narrates his own audiobooks. He has just finished recording his book Bothy Tales and has sent it off to Audible — Amazon’s audio recording arm — for processing.
I was surprised to discover from John’s podcast that Audible’s offices are on Mars, but this was useful to know. Our discussions of podcasts and audio recordings has given me the stimulus I needed to return to a project that has been on hold for a couple of years — to get my own books published as audiobooks.
I have spent my Easter weekend in lockdown auditioning narrators for the audio version of Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest. It’s been great fun and I had an overwhelming response — some 40 applications, many of an extremely high standard, from voiceover artists and announcers with years of experience, to established stage and TV actors.
I could happily have worked with half a dozen of these guys but I’m super excited about my chosen narrator. We will be starting the project this month and I’ll provide more details soon.