Author: Eneasz

I loved the Quake soundtrack, I listened to it often while not playing the game. The entire time that I was reading the Azkaban arc I heard Hall of Souls running through my head, over and over. It was the perfect background music – full of stalking, creeping menace. The whispers in the back of your head, the feeling that just beyond the doors things lie in wait that wish you only harm. I kinda wanted to have it running in the background the whole time, but I figured that might run into the same problem as the Phoenix Song (doesn’t work for everyone). Instead I used it as one of the intro/outro songs over the course of this arc. Because obviously there was no way something like Catch That Goblin could work here without destroying the entire mood.

It was the Azkaban arc that finally cemented in my mind that I was going to do this audio-book/podcast project. Before I had only been thinking “Man, I really wish this was in audio form so I could listen to it while working.” Afterwards I thought “Wow. This has to be done. No one else is doing it… what’s stopping me?”

I almost wanted to just jump straight to the Azkaban arc and do it right away. But there was simply no way for the arc to have the effect it does without all the groundwork laid down by the previous chapters. It’d be like listening to “Still Alive” without having played through Portal first. It’s still a good song, but all the emotional context is gone. I needed to have put out all the preceding chapters first in order to do the Azkaban arc now. Fortunately, it’s easy to change the distant past if you get started early enough. :) A year later it was the present again, and I wanted to do the Azkaban arc, and this time all the preceding audio work had already been done!

I’m glad there were so many episodes to do first – I learned an amazing amount on my way to chapter 52. So much so that I had to eventually completely redo the early chapters. The Azkaban arc would have been a shameful and wretched thing had I not gotten the dozens of hours of reading and hundreds of hours of editing experience in beforehand. Instead, I can note it as a huge success.