An Illusion in Red and White by Stephen Crane

Of all the stories heard and told by the newspaper men on the Cuban blockade, this murder was the one that most struck our narrator.  A man kills his wife in full sight of his four children, and yet they all testify that it was someone else, that the murderer looked quite different from their father.  Speculation about exactly how the man managed to convince his children of his innocence forms the basis of our story.

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Manacled by Stephen Crane

In this tiny gem of a story Stephen Crane packs in the suspense of one of our most terrifying cultural tropes.  He uses grim foreshadowing and plucky alliteration to spin the reader, before she can catch her breath to the inevitable conclusion.  Not for the agoraphobic listener!

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What were the first steps?

When the idea occurred to me to record stories for a podcast, my first concern was, what equipment and software will I need?  Will the sound quality be any good if I'm not in a professional studio?  I had narrated audiobooks for Audible.com and AudioGo, so I was familiar with the professional set up, but I didn't know how much of that technology I would need for my homegrown show.  

I started by testing a recording using Garage Band and the internal mic on my MacBook Pro - very low tech! I figured out that Garage Band would actually work just fine for software, but I needed a better microphone for reasonable sound quality. Luckily I was able to borrow The Blue Snowball! It's a USB mic, super easy to use and very cute:

Once I figured out the basics of how to use Garage Band, and found that the mic sounded great in my living room, I was ready to rumble! (Or rather, ready to read ;)

How did Bedtime Stories begin?

Hi, I'm Parker:

And I love to read:

So I started a podcast where I get to read stories out loud to all my friends: