While living with my (stupid, technophobic, loving) aunt, I roamed across Lake Forest, Laguna Hills and Mission Viejo, most times walking for an hour or more from point A to point B. In that time, my library of about 1,400 songs on my Sansa could not hold me, so I turned to the concept of Podcasts, starting with those on Screwattack.com.
One podcast lead to another, some were, and still are a lot of fun, but others sounded like someone recorded their monotone voice in a bathroom. One day, I found podiobooks.com. This is a site where authors, or authors to be, can put up their work in an audiobook format, and I'm hoping to contribute my own work for exposure. It was there, were I searched for the best work there, and branch out after I got a taste.
Running through some stories that have received major awards from the site, I found this superhero novel: http://www.podiobooks.com/title/playing-for-keeps
In a small nutshell, it's about a meta hero who has the ability to retain whatever belongs to her; she cannot have her possessions stolen from her. With a small ball that's given to her that both asshole heroes and asshole villains want, she has to decide whether to comply with a party or look out for herself. That's the first part anyway.
I enjoyed this audiobook immensely, pretty much to the point where I'm going to buy a *new* copy off of Amazon to support Mrs. Mighty Mur.
She also has a The Office parody (with zombies), called: The Takeover, I did not think much of that--'cuz I don't know where to watch the show sequentially without buying the DVD's, and a podcast about her experiences writing her novels.
She also has some useless, but damn enjoyable sundries about her observations,which I enjoyed called Geek Fu Action Grip.
The real, real crown jewel of her work is the Bangsian fantasy story, Heaven, part's one through five.
http://murverse.com/podcasts/#heaven
This set of stories is about two dead lovers in the afterlife. They find that heaven is too perfect, and go exploring, finding that all religions are basically true. There is far more to that, and the tone changes quickly though the first part for the better, but I can't reveal anything that would not spoil the stories.
Mur's Heaven in particular strikes a chord in me because it's basically about gods roaming with mortals nonchalantly (later on, anyway), and this is the sort of fiction that I always yearned for as a teenager, but I never found and did not yet have the skills to write properly. A story where Q joins Picard for a beer without any malice intended, so to speak.
I also love it because, well, it's so close to a work that I have written and rewritten before, that her story might as well be it! If that story of mine had kept going, and I did not abandon it, then it may have been very, very similar to Mur's work. (On a rights level, I never, ever let the internet, or anyone outside my immediate family see or learn about my similar story, so it wasn't stolen, this is coincidence)
All of Mur's stories, especially Heaven, quickly became something special to me, and they all have a professional, caring hand behind them that allows excellent readability. I highly recommend her work, and I hope that, like me, you become inspired, and enlightened by her prose as much as I did.
http://murverse.com/
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