Since this is Patriotic week I wanted to start off my weekly Podcast fiction reviews with something Patriotic.  I thought about it for a while and had a hard time coming up with anything.  Then it struck me.  What could be more Patriotic than a podcast novel that starts with the President of the United States at a political rally……getting his throat sliced open by a four year old Child.  Yes my first review will be of J.C. Hutchens 7^th Son – Book One – Descent.

As I was writing the review I realized that since it was the first one I was having to explain myself a little too much for it to be fair to the author.  With that in mind this 0 issue is intended to explain how I plan on conducting my reviews and what information I hope to present in them.  I hope to finish my rewrite of the review since pulling this information out and have it up this afternoon.  If something prevents this expect the first actual review next week.  These may come on Thursdays or Fridays based on when we have less content already being posted on the blog.

First off I tend to be fairly hard on reviewers.  I think that most lack a sense of professionalism and that they typically seem to either love everything or hate everything.  That is not really a problem if you have a sense of professionalism though.  If you can provide useful information about a piece of entertainment that can be used by others with differing opinions then you are still doing your job correctly.  With that in mind there is some basic information I will provide about every piece of podcast fiction I review.  These will be pure facts such as how long it is, the format, and whether there are multiple people reading or just the author.  I will also share links to the podcast feed and the promotional websites so you can listen for yourself or see what the author has to say about it.

A review will always require some aspect of opinion.  I will not try to introduce arbitrary number or star rankings, but you will know my opinion on the work and likely how I found it in each case before the review is done.  This is the nature of doing a review as pure facts would not be an enjoyable read and would also be less than useful in determining if a work of fiction is for you.  I think you will find my reviews to be very fair and neither gushing or venomous because neither are helpful to me.  I have many writing aspirations and hope to release a podcast novel myself someday so I am writing these with the same courtesy that I myself would want to be reviewed with.

I will give the basic story outline, but I will struggle to avoid spoilers.  This will be difficult at time.  Particularly the first review is part one of a trilogy.  As I review the other two parts it is going to get more and more difficult to not spoil the previous books.  I will try to avoid anything major, but it would be impossible to not spoil something.  I thought hard about whether or not to combine them all into one review, but felt that in doing that it would be even harder to avoid spoilers for the first book.  Unfortunately this may lead to the other two reviews being less than helpful.  If you enjoyed the first one then you are going to listen to the rest,  if you didn’t listen to the first one you probably aren’t going to care about the rest until you do, etc.  For this reason I may decided to split series reviews up so they do not come week by week.

Finally the name “From the Car” alludes to the fact that I listen to these mostly in the car.  I tend to drive a lot and found that for my own safety I needed something more mentally stimulating than music.  I do listen while at work or mowing the yard as well, but the majority of my listening time is in the car.  For this I have a device call the “iTrip” that my wife got me for Christmas last year.   It broadcasts my iPod over my car radio.  These devices are usually choppy at best, but I can’t recommend this particular one enough as it truly does provide crystal clear sound.