Updated Starwitch Audiobook

In the past month, I spent a great deal of time updating the audiobook for volume one of The Book of Newts, Starwitch, which now includes emotional performances for all of the characters, a new narrator and a little bit of music for the romantic scenes, to really amp up the jarring nature of the interrupted kisses.

I used Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, which is one of the most recognizably romantic pieces ever written, but I added some vinyl noise and at the end, a jarring record scratch, for the interrupted version. For the actual kissing scene, I used a more complete sample, without the record scratch.

However, when I got to a later chapter, in which the Blackwell sisters are attacked by "Roaring" Rowley, I searched long and hard for a public domain metal song that started with an electric guitar solo, without luck; they mostly start with the bass guitar, as is typical of heavy metal. In the end, I moved on, without including a sound effect for Rowley's Roar.

However, all of that got me thinking about volume three.

Doing Justice to a Musical Number

When I wrote The Next Horizon, I decided to include a scene with a musical number, in which the pirate Captain Edwina "Roaring" Rowley performed for Lieutenant Colonel Scarth Denholm and Captain Kristina "Killer" Krauss. Denholm and Krauss were pleasantly surprised, because they enjoyed the heavy metal number.

Rowley was just trying to be friendly and demonstrate a little something about herself, because she's a musician first and a pirate second. For that scene, I wrote the lyrics of a song titled Twinkle and Spin.

I wrote it to serve as the means to illuminate Denholm's dark mood, because she found the lyrics quite fitting to her situation. After alk, she'd just lost her first and only love: the Kingdom of Dugaria and more poignantly, her king, whom she would have laid down her life for, at a mere request. It had never been a romantic thing for her, but it's no understatement to say the love of her kingdom left no room for romance.

I never really thought I'd ever hear the lyrics turned into music, but during all the research I've been doing on text to speech engines, I sometimes came across music generators, because they use some pretty advanced TTS engines to provide vocals.

In the end, I decided to look into such software, because while I can live without having a sound effect for Rowley's Roar, I've decided I can't leave the audiobook for volume three without an actual musical version of Twinkle and Spin, since I'm planning to do volume two next, then probably three.

So, I've been playing around with music generators in the past few days and while it was an utter bear to get it running on my computer, I did eventually get ACE-Step 1.5 to work.

The first version of Twinkle and Spin had lots of flaws that suggested changes I needed to make (faster tempo and more time, to fit all lines and make room for some musical fun), but it was quite the emotional moment to hear lyrics I wrote turned into music.

My system has to run all of this on the processor, so it's incredibly slow, taking an hour and forty minutes to produce a five minute song, but like all of my projects, I refuse to do serious work via the cloud (A.K.A. somebody else's computer) for anything other than initial testing. I'll accept overnight batch runs on my own hardware before I'll ever accept growing dependent on the cloud.

After only a handful of runs, I got real lucky, with only one word mispronounced and the repeat of the chorus at the end omits the word 'they'.

The mispronounced word is only barely noticeable, because it's an overly soft pronunciation of the last letter of 'spark', in the second verse, making it sound more like 'spar', rather than 'spark'. I missed it the first few times, even though I was looking for mistakes. Both are such small things, I don't care and can certainly live with them. The happy result follows.

Twinkle and Spin

Here's a link to the MP3 file, if you'd like to download it.

Twinkle and Spin is copyright 2026, Owen Tyme, all rights reserved, but free for your personal enjoyment. E-mail me if you want to use it for something else.

Stars twinkle in the night,
Yellow, red and blue,
Always so very bright,
Shining just for you.

Chorus: They twinkle and spin,
Showing where you've been!

Walking back in the dark,
Tired, worn and spent,
Absent is the spark,
Heading for your tent.

(Chorus)

Gazes meet by star light,
Loved one waits for you,
In their arms take fright,
All the stars askew!

(Chorus)

You're old and lonely now,
Love lost with star's fall,
Now your head does bow,
Your heart in star's thrall.

(Chorus)

Memories never gone,
Heart tight with sadness,
Yet eyes always drawn,
Upward in madness.

(Chorus)

You can't stop them with laws,
Just shining all hours,
Effect without cause,
While your grave flowers.

(Chorus)

(Chorus)

Hobby Acquired: Writing Song Lyrics

This has turned out to be surprisingly fun for me, since I love music and I have a decent ear for it, though I have tastes that are hard to please (rock/metal with skilled female vocals and great guitars).

Perhaps I should have taken some music classes in college, but oh well.

ACE-Step is letting me do something I've never been able to do before, which is really sparking my imagination. It's also letting me make music that would be impossible for me: female vocals.

However, I can most certainly write lyrics, which are just a very rigid form of poetry, since matching syllable counts between verses is important, lest it disrupt the rhythm of the music. I learned that much just from singing hymns in church. When I wrote Twinkle and Spin, I studied the way a few of those are laid out, to gain some insight into how lyrics should be structured.

Maybe I'll take the time to study more about music at some point, but for now, I'm content to use ACE-Step to add some Easter eggs to my website and it should be nice to have some custom intro music for future teaser videos.

I'm definitely going to try putting together a full album of music from Rowley, probably ten tracks. One down, nine to go.

With Twinkle and Spin out of the way, I think Rowley's Roar should be next, which will be the instrumental piece she uses to stun. After that, I'll probably focus on Hopeless in the Void, the insanely aggressive instrumental piece she uses to shatter skulls.

Parting Words

Despite the fact Rowley's ship was destroyed with her on board, "Roaring" Rowley is not gone! It will be some time before I get to it (likely 2-3 years out), but she will be coming back in volume four of The Book of Newts!

Will she be an enemy or an ally? Whose side will she be on or will it be just the same as ever: her own? And how the heck could she possibly have survived her star ship's breaking up? For now, enjoy speculating.

When I post about future tracks, I'll probably write a little first-person monologue from the perspective of Rowley, to explain the meaning and have a little fun with writing.

Tags: audio, music, roaring-rowley