Thank you!

Pooh and I have long been friends and I am very glad to met Edward.

@Daniel Cotton: how do you know you want to see a movie without seeing the trailer? Do you guess by which actor/director/screenwriter/caterer is involved in the movie? You are influenced SOME way, so why not watch the trailer? I often get a kick out of watching what turns out to being a truly crappy movie by trying to assimilate what the trailer promised with what the director delivered!

Anyway, Steve, don’t do away with the intros, please! Perhaps you can give a specific timestamp at the beginning to let those who don’t want to listen to skip and not have to guess where the story starts. Their loss, not mine!

However, in this case, I’ll disagree with Steve’s intro – I don’t think that we like Hero Journey stories b/c they are so different from our normal live. I think we like them b/c most of us see our lives as adventures everyday with hurdles and obstacles to overcome. Okay, maybe not life and death hurdles, but hurdles nonetheless.

This is no more evident than in the college students I teach to whom every hurdle is a major-coping experience and traumatic. Most of them figure that if they can just get through the unknown of the day, they win!

Thus, I think we like these stories b/c we all relate – maybe in just a small way – with the hero, as we trudge off to our jobs/careers/etc. not knowing what we’ll have to overcome to make it back home later.

And on top of that, the story was great!

Thanks Steve for the consistent high, high quality!

Bravo, Mr. Scholes. You have managed to sample from two very BIG, heavy-hitting concepts in literature and managed to have a story that is simultaneously a nod to the originals, and stands fabulously well all by itself.

I’d even go so far as to say that anyone who has heard of neither Winnie the Pooh, nor Lord of the Rings (assuming of course that such a person exists in this world today who’s over the age of 3), would still be pleasantly stunned by this story.

The impact of hearing a character that represented this beloved friend going through the trials he did, and showing the courage that he did, made me proud and sad at the same time.

It is the reluctant loss of innocence that we all dread to see in our own children that is the source of our fear. And yet the hero in this story is able to maintain that to the very end.

This is a story I will not forget. Congratulations.

Touching, in a very thoughtful way.

Yes, you got me to cry, and feel like I am not such a silly bear after all.

Thanks.

This is a top five for me Steve. Now I have to go cry again……….

I was introduced to EscapePod a few months ago and it has been a great way for me to keep my hands warm while waiting for the bus to work (I live in the northeast US and usually read a book). I get the feeling that Steve has read a few Pooh stories aloud…his voicing of the “oh bother”s and “expotition”s were spot on. On the introductions…I personally like them. I like the information about the authors and the tie-ins of the story to current goings-on. Thanks Steve and keep up the good work.

This is a stellar piece of writing.

@Nora

I though that the capitalized phrases came across pretty well in the reading, although I did mentally picture the reader doing finger-quotes during those parts as opposed to just capitalizing them.
I will agree that some things can never come across as well in other mediums as they do in writing. This why so many movie adaptations of novels rarely do the story proper justice.

I picked up the Pooh references late into the reading, and I was already picturing Edward as my childhood teddy bear. But that only added to my enjoyment of the story.

As regards the intro. In general I agree with Irked. I avoid “trailers” like the plague if I know I’m going to see a movie, because I want the storyline to be a surprise – to be part of the experience for me. The same goes for my fiction. However, I feel most of the time Steve does a good job, and in this instance he didn’t give away anything that the title didn’t already allude to. I’m happy to hear about the author and where the story first appeared and when. The warnings/rating are of course important. It’s just if possible I would like all the references to what occurs to be left ’till after and discussed then. At that point I might even listen a second time to see if I agree.

Tastefully done, and so not over the top.

Well done. And thank you.

This story moved me in a wonderful way. I felt it was a bit slow to start, but epically heroic by the end.

As you mentioned in your intro, epic hero stories tend to move many people, and I’m included in that group. I always love a story where an unassuming protagonist steps beyond their normal life to do something unimaginable. I can get quite emotional to such stories.

This story moved me to tears at the end. The interwoven bits referencing Milne’s classic tales were fantastic and helped enhance the story all-around. I’m very proud to say that I cried both from joy and sorry at the end of this, which I believe is my favorite of all time, Escape Pod story.

keep up the intros steve, without them escape pod would not be escape pod anymore

and the story was a super.

But…

Based on human history, the parrotishes may come to wish they’d never helped Edward.

I’m Dutch and we also aren’t used to ‘long’ breaks before or during a show.
But the intro works for me, because I want to hear some of Steve’s considerations, and what the story is about, and I want to hear his view on matters.

BTW, Your mp3-player allows you to skip forward if you don’t like it. Incidentally pausing it doesn’t work, because it makes the ‘break’ longer.

If it were the other way around, an ‘intro’ of about 30 minutes and a 3 minute story, I’d agree with you, but this is just 3 minutes. Less than 10% of the amount of time the story took.

And about colouring someone’s perception, I hope you are less impressionable than that. I’ll make up my own mind about the story thankyouverymuch, during the reading.
But if after the intro I don’t like the preface of the story, I can easily skip to the next track on my mp3player.

Commentary before is an insult to the author. You are colouring the reader’s perception of the story so they see the story in the light YOU want to project on it (“Hero’s Journey”, FCOL!), rather than letting them experience the story in the way that the author intended.

Would you try introducing the story as an allegory of modernday politics? No, because that would be projecting your political views onto the author’s story. So why project your literary opinions all over it?

Other than that, the story’s sweet, and is read well.

But to me, in the UK, with no TV and ad-blockers filtering the web, it seems excessively intrusive. So I paused it there (I hope the story’s about to start finally…)

AFTER the story, sure, I want to discuss it, listen to others’ thoughts on it, have the cool bits I might have missed pointed out, to hear about the author and so on.

Before, I definitely do not want metacontent and discussion and critique and author bio and ads and electronic voices telling me what it is, and to hear the title of the story half a dozen times.

What I want, is quite simply to hear the story.

Podcasters always get this wrong: they frontload the podcast with the metainfo, instead of appending it afterwards, at the point where it would be of interest.

Almost nobody watches the DVD extras BEFORE the movie.

I fixed my iPod over the weekend and was directed by BoingBoing to listen. Fortunately, I had already downloaded this episode. Unfortunately, I have a short commute, so I had to spend a good amount of time in the car listening to the entire thing.

Not to sound too trite — and I apologize in advance for the sappiness to follow — but parenthood changed me. I can’t listen to a story like this in the same way I could just three years ago. Well-told tales of children suffering affect me differently now. I don’t anticipate being able to get the opening scene of this story out of my head for some time.

This reminds me of the pain I felt somewhat a few months back when, for some reason, I watched Grave of the Fireflies for the first time. I don’t think I ever cried so hard. Obviously, Edward Bear didn’t affect me as severely as Grave, but it remind me of the hurt. And that’s a good pain; it grounds me and makes me a better, more compassionate person.

Nice job of reading Stephen. Nice job of writing Ken, I look forward to picking up your collection.

The first is that I would like to suggest that part of our affinity toward quest stories and the hero’s journey comes from the fact that each and everyone one of us recognizes that journey from our own lives, albiet in more prosiac forms such as Graduate School, caring for a dying loved one, heck all of puberty itself is like one long long walk toward a goal that we never quite believe we will reach (and then when we reach adulthood we find it’s just the beginning of another long long walk).

The second is that this is one of the best stories I’ve heard on Escape Pod and I sincerely want to thank Ken Scholes for writing it and Steve Eley for publishing and reading it. I have nothing pithy or clever to say about it, just . . . “thanks.”

(And congrats on getting BoingBoinged!)

I like reading more than listening…

The story itself is brilliant, but kudos also to Eley’s reading. Spielberg couldn’t make us love a mechanical AI bear. But Stephen Eley did.

Great story, Steve (not mr.) Eley, thanks to Ken Scholes for writing this amazing piece of fiction.
It really had me to tears.
Thank goodness, I was at home when I listened to it, instead of driving my car, which is where I normally listen to Escape Pod.

The central idea of putting Pooh into a memory-poor toy robot with a life-saving mission was a brilliant one, and the author pulled it off flawlessly. As far as I’m concerned, this story deserves a place in the Pooh canon.

It will be out in print (again) this coming November in my collection LONG WALKS, LAST FLIGHTS AND OTHER JOURNEYS (from Fairwood Press.)

Thanks again, everyone! I’m grateful for the kind words.

I really liked how the story had a sense of whimsy, but at the same time was very adult. I’ll admit that I even teared up a bit at the end.

:’)

I’m not sure if I love it or hate it for this.

It is a great story. Thanks for sharing it with us.