The Storytellers Blog

Over the past couple of months, the majority of my posts have been about my mental and emotional struggles with food, depression and tiredness. Well, for the most part I’ve always tended to write about what’s playing most on my mind at the time, and without doubt these are the subjects that have been almost exclusively occupying my thoughts of late.

If I’m honest, I have a slight fear that this is going to turn into the Ramblings of the Depressed One, and I really don’t want that to happen. Unfortunately my mind keeps drawing a blank when I decide I want to write about something else.

However, last week I came up with a stonker of an idea, and spare time over the past few days has been spent developing the groundwork for a new blog.

It’s OK, you don’t have to get jealous – I’m not leaving you for another. This is an extra, an enhancement, not a replacement. In fact I hope you’ll want to join us.

The idea of The Storytellers Blog sprang to mind when I was visiting Eryl’s blog (The Kitchen Bitch Ponders) and enjoying listening to her audio recording of an old Inuit tale. I was struck by how wonderful it was to just sit back and listen; how completely different the experience is to reading.

Of course this is hardy a new concept. Audio cassettes and CDs abound, Radio 4 is made up almost entirely of voice-based content, and podcasting is rife.

But in the blogging world we read. Occasionally we post YouTube videos or photos, but mostly it’s the written word that’s King. I’ve made a handful of audio blogs here, but they were experimental and I wasn’t really sure what to do with them.

So the idea of The Storytellers Blog is to have a place which is exclusively audio based stories. Stories can be written by the narrator, or be an unusual or favourite tale, like Eryl’s one about Tuglik and her Granddaughter.

I immediately emailed Eryl to see if she was up for the idea and she seemed as excited as me about it. I set up a basic blog, we both posted stories we already had formatted and I’ve spent the weekend jigging the design and putting together tutorials and FAQs.

While Eryl and I have kick started this thing, we hope it will become a real community blog, with lots of people joining us and recording and uploading their own stories.

So go and take a look, start recording your stories and add the site to your favourites. And if you’re the kind of blogger who likes banners on your sidebar, I’ve even created one of those for you.