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Commemorating Scott's tenth year in audiobooks.

Ah, December. My favorite time of year. The weather gets chillier, the mood of the country turns marginally warmer, and the Christmas carols — which have been playing in Target and Walmart for months now — suddenly have new meaning. (This particular year, I gave myself permission to do something I’ve never done before: listen to one of my own audiobooks. I couldn’t help it, I brought out A CHRISTMAS CAROL and plugged it in. Seemed the right time for it, right?) I’ve noticed that most people love the end of December, the week of Christmas itself, but for me, I truly love the time immediately after Thanksgiving, probably because it brings a lot of valuable things to mind.

First off, it’s when I reflect on all the things I’m truly thankful for this year.

Second, it’s when I start getting serious about what I intend to buy people for their gift that particular year.

And third, I’m reminded of my best-intentioned promises the previous January, all those New Year’s resolutions that have possibly slid by the wayside as we make our way back to winter again.

Well, with those three things in mind, I’ve decided it’s time I gave you all a gift, each and every one of you who subscribe to this newsletter and have been so good as to support our efforts here. But what could it be? What could possibly satisfy all the various folk who tune in to these blog posts with regularity? You don’t exactly all fit into one neat gift-giving category, after all. Some of you show up for the book news, others for the professional advice, and still others for the Share the Experience contest we’ve been running, lo these many months now. Could there possibly be something that would satisfy all those demographics?

Let’s just say that, after making my list, and checking it twice, I think I’ve found just the thing. Or things, plural.

Okay, no more suspense.

First off, for those of you who tune in for the books themselves, I’m offering our biggest discount of the year, should you find something you wish to download (or hardcopies, too, they’ll also qualify — the aforementioned A CHRISTMAS CAROL hardcopy makes quite the stocking stuffer). For the month of December only, anything and everything for sale here at Brick By Brick Audiobooks will have an automatic 15% discount. But I hasten to point out, if you’re in the mood to purchase an entire series, that will be in addition to our standard 10% trilogy discounts. So, if you want the entire PHOENIX LEGACY in one fell swoop, you’ll be getting it for 25% off. All you have to do is put “xmas2009” in the coupon box (without the quote marks) when you check out. (Hard copies will be automatically discounted. Also, the discount is only on the product itself; it doesn’t affect tax or shipping). Trust me, we probably won’t be running this kind of sale again.

Click here to check out all the titles on sale now!

Did a vistitation by Spirits engender this holiday generosity?

But then there’s the rest of you, our other primary demographic, the folks who’ve been patiently tuning in for months now, hoping for news about the contest. What I’m giving YOU is… wait for it… a new employee.

There will be a slight pause while everyone says, “Huh?”

I’ll explain. There was no way of knowing at the start of the contest what kind of overwhelming response we’d have on it, and our judges have understandably needed to take quite a bit more time slogging their way through all those 400 submissions. Most of our judges are lucky if they listen to a few dozen submissions a year, but four hundred? Well, I’ve said all this before, and you’ve all been patient to the point of sainthood, so instead I’ll say this: there was also no way of knowing just how much time this contest would take away from my narrating duties – or even the other way around, how much time my narrating duties would take away from the contest. I’ve done my best to keep people apprised of the little news we’ve had to share, I’ve answered several hundred personal emails with info and encouragement, posted dozens of updates on FaceBook and Twitter, but that hasn’t brought us any closer to the goal: the end of the contest. What we need around here is someone who’s got the time to devote to this here enterprise, and thus far, that clearly hasn’t been me.

So say hello to Gina Smith, everyone. A longtime friend and my long-suffering manager, she’ll be handling several new aspects of the contest from now on. Her job will be simple: to interface with the judges, and hopefully light a fire under them to get this assessment period of the contest finished as soon as humanly possible. I’ll still be here, working away, but it’s clearly time to bring in the big guns. If you’ve got any questions about the contest or its status, drop Gina a note gina@scottbrickpresents.com.

This is long overdue. For those of you who’ve been following our publishing schedule here, as you’ve no doubt noticed, there hasn’t been any as of late. That’s because I couldn’t in good conscience keep a commercial enterprise going (albeit one based on love and a passion for great literature) while so many people were waiting so patiently. I’m not running this contest to make money – obviously, it’s just the opposite – so I’ve refrained as much as possible from trying to sell anything else, even the books we always offer. Just didn’t seem right. That said, however, there are also lots of people out there waiting for the next series to begin (and trust me when I say we’ve been acquiring some AWESOME titles, stuff I know you’re going to love), so it’s time to get going with that again. The sooner we’re done with the contest, the sooner you dedicated listeners will have more to hear.

One last note, for those of you who want faster contest updates than I’ve been able to provide here, I hope you’ll check in with me on FaceBook and Twitter. Posts here on the website are fairly labor- and time-intensive, but I can usually dash off instant responses on either of those social networks.

And having said all that, okay, it’s time to wrap up, everyone’s got Christmas shopping to do, I’m sure. My thanks to all of you for your patience. We started this contest together and we’ll finish it together. It hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s still going, and hopefully, with Gina’s help, we’ll have a resolution in the very near future. In the meantime, however, I hope you all have a fabulous holiday season. As Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone.

Thanks for listening, and merry Christmas!

Scott Brick

Hi everyone, Scott here. The contest we’ve been running this past month to find the audiobook industry’s next great talent, dubbed “Audiobook Idol” on Twitter by author Kevin Guilfoile, will now be extended an additional seven days.

That’s right, you get an extra week: the cut-off for submissions is now midnight on Tuesday, July 7 (meaning the midnight between Tuesday, July 7th and Wednesday, July 8th).

So everyone who’s been stressing to get their demo finished and submitted in time, fear not, your wish has been granted. Think of it as us holding the curtain for late seating. Or just wanting to enjoy the Fourth of July weekend before starting the grueling judging process.

My thanks to everyone here at Scott Brick Presents for making this all possible, and my thanks as well to everyone who’s entered the contest thus far. It’s been a wild ride, and I can’t wait to see where it goes…

Thanks for listening, and good luck!

Scott Brick

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SPECIAL NOTICE: For the first time, Brick By Brick Audiobooks offers this recording on CD, as well as MP3 download.  Given that A CHRISTMAS CAROL is such a holiday favorite and makes a perfect stocking stuffer, and given that you can’t put a bow on an MP3, we thought we’d package everything up for you in a hardcopy release.  Just check out the link below and you can purchase the 5-CD package.

Also, I’m happy to announce that we have a special BONUS FEATURE that accompanies both the digital and CD versions – more on that below.

Click here to hear Scott read from A CHRISTMAS CAROL
and buy the digital download

Click here to hear a sample and buy A CHRISTMAS CAROL on CD

 Now, on to our tale…

Well, it’s Christmas again.  I realize, of course, that you’ve probably been hearing Christmas music in your local Target since late August, but the traditional start of the holiday season is the moment Santa Claus makes his appearance at the end of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which means that it’s finally official: it’s Christmastime, once again.  And I couldn’t be happier.

Each year, as December rolls around, I’m reminded of one of the best periods of my life, when I appeared in a touring production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL with my Shakespearean acting group, Will & Company.  Together we would take all of our various classical productions on the road throughout the state of California, and while December would always be a slow month for Shakespeare, it more than made up for this by the rush on Charles Dickens.  One year we were booked into more than a hundred performances, just in that brief span.  Think about that: 100 performances between December 1st and Christmas, less than twenty days, given that we only performed on school days.  We had to form a second company to handle the shows we couldn’t do personally.  It was nuts, but we all loved it.

I first played Ebenezer Scrooge when I was in high school, living in Porterville, California, acting with the local children’s theater company.  Given that I was the oldest person in the cast, it was fairly logical I’d get tapped to play the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner, and I had a blast.  Great fun, and we performed for over a thousand people one night.  (Small towns really turn out to support their own.)  Flash-forward to ten years later: after leaving UCLA and hooking up with Will & Company, I got to reconnect with the show in a terrific way: by playing virtually every male part in the story.

Jacob Marley (who was once introduced by our very tired narrator as “Bob Marley,” at which point I entered bobbing to a Rasta beat, much to Scrooge’s chagrin), Bob Cratchit, the gentleman at the top of the show who makes the error in judgment to ask Scrooge for a charitable donation, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet To Come… I even played the narrator, Charles Dickens himself, once, when that actor took sick.  That was the day I realized I had performed this play so many times – hundreds, in fact – that I rarely had to look down at the text to narrate the show; I’d virtually memorized the whole thing.

Colin Cox was our artistic director and he had originally adapted this show himself, using the text Dickens had used on tour, reading the tale to hungry American audiences, an abridgement wholly approved by the author that also made it an ideal length for performing at schools.  Well, several years later, I asked Colin if I could make some amendments to the adaptation, and he happily agreed.  To do so, I borrowed from some of my favorite productions of the show over the years, adding lovely moments from the radio adaptation performed by Lionel Barrymore and Orson Welles in 1939 – such as the moment Bob Cratchit offers tuppence to the charitable gentleman after Scrooge angrily turns him away – as well as stage adaptations I’d seen, most notably Patrick Stewart’s one-man version.  In it, scenes that were alluded to in the text but didn’t actually appear, such as Tiny Tim singing a song at Christmas dinner, or Scrooge attending church services in the final act, were fleshed out so that we actually heard Tiny Tim sing, and saw Scrooge struggling to find the melody in a crowd of worshipers singing a Christmas hymn.  They were wonderful moments, and I wanted to experience them myself, so in they went.

Click here to hear Scott read from A CHRISTMAS CAROL
and buy the digital download

Click here to hear a sample and buy A CHRISTMAS CAROL on CD

We had a lovely time that year, my last season with the company, and it was the first time I’d played Scrooge since high school.  Wendy Robie, she of TWIN PEAKS fame (Nadine, the eyepatch lady), actually played Dickens for us.  We were a company that prided ourselves on being gender- and ethnicity-blind when it came to casting, and given Wendy’s love of the story, it seemed a natural she should play our narrator.  She looked fabulous in a Dickensian tuxedo, and performed her part with relish.  Wendy told me afterward that it was the greatest time she’d ever had onstage, and I treasure that memory to this day.

An especially nice thing happened that season: having just created its website that year, Will & Company put together a separate webpage devoted to each of its touring productions.  Given that I was directing and starring in A CHRISTMAS CAROL that year, I wrote up that particular page.  I whipped together a brief description of the story’s creation, peppering it with little known facts and quotations from reviews it received upon its debut, then summed it all up by saying what we hoped to accomplish with our rendition of it.  Well, that particular page proved very popular in Google searches, getting thousands of page hits, and I received dozens of emails shortly thereafter, primarily from people who were staging their own version of the CAROL and wanted to know if they could print my essay as the liner notes in their theatrical programs.  I was honored, and always said yes.  And anyone who read that page when it was up on the website years ago will recognize it when you listen to my recording: I adapted that essay into the introduction for this volume.

So, in a sense, my Will & Company introduction is a BONUS FEATURE on A CHRISTMAS CAROL, but there’s another that I think you’ll really enjoy.  Along with your MP3s or CDs you’ll receive a file containing copies of artist John Leech’s eight illustrations that accompanied the original printing of A CHRISTMAS CAROL way back in 1843.  Given how much Leech’s work enhanced Dickens’s magnificent story, I thought it was only appropriate to include them here.

Click here to hear Scott read from A CHRISTMAS CAROL
and buy the digital download

Click here to hear a sample and buy A CHRISTMAS CAROL on CD

Getting to record A CHRISTMAS CAROL this year has, in many ways, brought me back to my roots in acting.  It’s reminded me of the power of sharing wonderful stories, forcefully imagined and executed, stories that are unashamedly sentimental, and all the more powerful for it.  None of us would appreciate this tale were it not so clear-cut in its morality, nor would we see ourselves in Scrooge were he not so much larger than life.  And every moment I spent in the studio recording it, every line that came out of my mouth, brought back a wonderful memory from my days on the road, sharing this story with children of all ages.  It’s also allowed me the chance to work with one of my oldest friends, John Massey, a buddy from Ocean View High School who created a lovely and haunting soundtrack that I think you’ll really love.  In short, recording this book has been a gift I’ll treasure always. 

That’s the wonderful thing about gifts, isn’t it?  Here I’d intended the story as a gift to people who enjoy my work and wanted something special to listen to this Christmas. Yet it turns out that it’s I who’ve been blessed, getting to relive the memories of so many of the great people and events in my life connected to Charles Dickens’s classic tale.

Whatever your faith, I hope this Christmas season is everything you wish it to be, and that happiness, blessings and prosperity will pour forth abundantly upon your families in the year to come.  I hope that this is the year we all discover how to keep Christmas in our hearts, no matter the season.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us.  Thanks so very much for your support.  As always, thanks for listening.

Scott Brick