Carlos and I met at Readercon in 2014 and became friendly Internet acquaintances. Then, in January 2015, Carlos accepted my Facebook challenge to collaborate on a short story.
We wrote “Book of May” over a series of VERY early mornings, and lo! Mike and Anita Allen at Mythic Delirium published it in Clockwork Phoenix 5.
Shortly after this, dear Reader, I married Carlos. (Well, relatively shortly after. Other stuff happened first. But this is where it all began.)
And now, six years later, “The Book of May” is live at Podcastle.org! This is the first time it exists in audio form, and Carlos and I do the narrations.
Fun Fact I: Setsu Uzume mentions This Is How You Lose the Time War in their “Book of May” outro. At the time I was first becoming friends with Carlos, exchanging letters with him and collaborating on this story, my dear friend Amal El-Mohtar was also first becoming friends with Max Gladstone… with whom she later wrote This is How You Lose the Time War. She and I would write letters to each other about our new correspondents/collaborators/friends.
Fun Fact II: Carlos and I were chatting about how we’d love for “Book of May” to have a second life in reprints somehow. I proposed us sending it to Podcastle, even though it is a leeetle long for their guidelines. But their guidelines also say to query in that case. So I did. Funnily enough, the editor Jen Albert had recently been given our story to read by mutual friend, poet and essayist Dominik Parisien. She was just about to write to us about it!
Other Places To Find Our Narrated Work
If you enjoyed “Book of May” on Podcastle.org want to hear me narrate a few of my erotic fairy tales and/or ghost stories, there’s always my collection THE WITCH IN THE ALMOND TREE: AND OTHER STORIES/
I also narrated my Tor.com novella DESDEMONA AND THE DEEP for Recorded Books, and my World Fantasy Award-winning collections BONE SWANS for Tantor Media.
If you loved listening to Carlos read “Book of May” for Podcastle, I gotta tell you about the Story Seeds Podcast. Carlos collaborated with two young writers (Zarana and Siri, age 10) to create a new story together. Hear him narrate their “The Paintbrush of Doom” here!
Last summer (2020), he also did this great “Volcanic Writing” vlog as a creative writing exercise for kids! (And the rest of us.)
Don’t forget, if you want to hear another WONDERFUL Carlos Hernandez short story narrated by a LEGENDARY narrator, Levar Burton narrates “Fantaisie Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66” for Levar Burton Reads.
And last but not least, I want to mention Carlos’s two middle-grade novels for Rick Riordan Presents: SAL AND GABI BREAK THE UNIVERSE, and SAL AND GABI FIX THE UNIVERSE. (Spoiler, they don’t. They just break it some more.) They are narrated by Anthony Rey Perez, both Editors’ Picks on Amazon, both winners of the Earphones Award in AudioFile Magazine.
C.S.E. Cooney 