First Post!

Hi, everyone. This is Joe, blogging from high atop... er, deep underneath... um... on the relatively flat earth of Ohio.

As of tomorrow, we'll be exactly one month away from the launch of The Book of Voices. While it's my fourth book to be published, I'm more excited and jittery about it than about any of the previous ones. It's the culmination of a project that has taken four years so far, and which most definitely will not end with the release.

This website is a big part of the book. I see it as a living extension of it. I'm creating pages for each of the 49 stories in the book, plus one for the frame story. Each will have information as to the context of the story and what happened afterward, as well as notes about issues within it and how it came to be written.

Most importantly, each has a discussion question, "The Voice in Your Life." Each question reflects on ethical issues and related matters within the story, and asks you whether you have encountered them in your life and how you dealt with them.

(One caveat, which I may put on the "Your Voices" page: while these questions will look deep into issues in your lives and your history, I recommend that you pause for a moment before answering them. Remember that posts online are public and, due to such projects as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, effectively permanent. So be cautious of posting anything that would cause problems if a future employer or potential relationship partner might read it.)

I'm also working on putting together a podcast of the stories. The first few should be ready by the time that the book is released, and future ones will roll out over the next year or so. There will be a video trailer for the book (and the initial animation sketches look awesome), as well as other related stuff.

So I am, as they say, busier than a one-armed paperhanger, working on all this in addition to the day job. It's exhausting but, as I've said, exciting. And I'm eagerly looking forward to people reading (and, I hope, buying) the book, and participating in this expanding universe for which it will be the seed.