I love audiobooks, especially unabridged audiobooks read by the author. Since I haven’t been innundated with offers to adapt my stories to audio, I’ve taken it upon myself to record my own work. I’ve just posted the my first effort, a reading of my story “To Market, To Market, the Branding of Billy Bailey,” which ran in last September’s Interzone. It’s an 11.4 MB MP3, but if you’ve got a DSL or cablemodem connection, give it a try!

Billy kept his head up as he left for school the next day, for Barbara and Buford Bailey’s benefit. But once he’d turned the corner at the end of the block, he slowed down, dropped his gaze to his loafers, and fretted. Billy’s brand had been established early on, in the first month of kindergarten. He’d been the first in the category — he’d defined “heel” for his classmates. Sure, there’d been heels in the upper grades, but they had no interaction with his class.

Billy had been _the_ heel. When others followed the trail he’d blazed, pitching spitwads or putting the boot in during a game of British Bulldog, their behaviour had been compared to Billy’s. More than half of the endorsement dollars that flowed into the sixth grade went straight into Billy’s trust account.

As well they should. If you were a sixth-grader looking for a risque t-shirt, nine times out of ten it’d be a shirt that Billy had worn that week. If you went to see a violent movie, it’d be one that Billy had presented a book-report on. If you wanted a PDA with a shotgun mic attachment for cross-playground spying, what better model than the one that Billy could often be seen holding up to his ear, grinning mischievously?

In the minds of the consumers of Pepsi Elementary, Billy owned the word “mischief.” The immutable wisdom of the ages said that nothing Billy could do would change that. It would be like trying to sell Evian Brake Fluid. A brand-killer.

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