Thursday 18 February 2021

Evan's Land Audio Book

I have created an audio book of my debut novel Evan's Land, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/02/evans-land-audio-book.html.
This replaces the previous much lower quality audio book I originally put on YouTube a few years ago. Evan's Land was published as a paperback book in 2002 by The Aldyth Press and sold reasonably well; I broke even on it at least. The thousand odd printed copies are still circulating in the bloodstream of remainder online sales, but usually for exorbitant prices. Don't blame me; the wholesalers set the prices! I have talked about this work several times. It is epic in extent, at over 370,000 words. The final book was 954 pages long. It took me about three years to write and at the time I was very proud of it, but now I look back on it with two decades of hindsight and can see its numerous flaws. After I published my far superior Roswell trilogy, I decided to let Evan's Land die. It had had a good run and it wasn't that good, so I sort of disowned it. But then I changed my mind and thought: warts and all, it is still my first novel. It's a part of my history as an author. It really should be preserved. I have done that for my second novel Rockall, which has a similar publication history to Evan's. At the same time I received letters from people saying they really enjoyed it, even recent ones from when I was flogging it off on my conference stalls. A stranger contacted me on Facebook about it. One man even told me it was the best book he'd ever read! So I embarked on a quest to archive Evan's Land as a free audio book. I also have plans to publish a text version soon, if possible. Reading out the novel after twenty years was a strange experience. Evan's was my first and longest work, by far; but it is also far more emotionally intense than anything I've ever written, before or since. Today I would say it borders on overly-sentimental. Some segments actually make me cringe, either because they are so very treacly or just low quality. It's also very sexually explicit; it makes me blush a bit. My style has changed so much since my early period, as readers of the Roswell books will notice. There is so much I could say about what the book means that it would almost fill another book! On one level, it is a satire of Welsh politics. I started writing it as I was breaking out of my Welsh nationalist phase. I would probably have given myself a Welsh pen-name if I didn't already have such a very Welsh name. I was getting into conspiracy theories, but this theme is all but absent in the book. There is only one reference, Warren telling Evan that "Free Wales" fakes bomb attacks from Roland Cooper. So I was still mostly a normie back then, even though at the time I was reading David Icke and other alternative thinkers. I don't have the memory to explain this dichotomy. It is also about me personally. Evan Hughes is partly based on me as I was when I was in my late teens. Whatever the good and bad or right and wrong, it was hard work putting together this new audio book, but I'm glad I did it.