Audio version of “Playing Games”

Here’s the link: https://cliffaliperti.substack.com/p/playing-games … and here’s me blabbing about it:

I’d been wanting to play around with audio or video with my stories for awhile now. When I noticed that some of the journals that had previously published my work had since disappeared, I decided to take it as an opportunity to recycle some older work that had otherwise vanished from view.

I really wanted to do video, but even I found myself bored at the idea of watching myself just reading, whether from a print-out or my computer screen. I suppose I could have clipped some images, and made a show out of the entire thing, but it would have been amateurish to view and a total time-suck of a project that I wasn’t interested in taking on. Can’t afford to pay anyone to do this (sorry!), and AI seems an unpopular answer to which, frankly, I haven’t even figured out the questions to ask yet. So, maybe video one day. Audio for now.

Needed somewhere for audio to live. I’ve run enough image-intense websites to imagine MP3 files would quickly eat my bandwidth. Coin toss time: Patreon or Substack. I had tried Patreon way back when, hoping to promote my classic movie website, but I was too early. Like, I think I tried Patreon in response to its launch. Closed mine up quick. Substack was interesting though, looked pretty easy, so what the hey, I’m giving it a whirl.

I chose “Playing Games” to begin with, simply because it’s the oldest of my currently published full-length stories, and because I was upset last year when I found out Fleas on the Dog had shut down. Many thanks to them for accepting this story for publication in Issue 9, back in 2021. Their entire site has disappeared, so it seemed natural to reprint “Playing Games” myself, giving you something to read along with while you’re charmed by the cahs and mawls of my exotic native Long Islandese.

You can read and hear “Playing Games” at my Substack (that’s right, at my Substack [don’t punch me!]). The audio runs fifteen minutes. Hoping that you get that far, I’ll go a step further and ask you to please “Like” the post and subscribe if you want more. It’s totally free, no paid options even offered at the moment, but I’ll probably dream on that a bit. Thanks for reading … and listening too!