Hi, this is Lauren Schaffold, the voice of Liz Horton. Welcome to the official adventures and Odyssey podcast.

Welcome to the official adventures and Odyssey podcast. I'm Jesse, editor of Focus on the Family Clubhouse magazine, and this is the November 15th 2006 edition.

Coming up on the podcast, we'll talk to Paul Herlinger, the voice of Witt, about his early days in acting, before there was television.

But that's another story, and this is the latest news.

Our news item takes us back to 1992.

Imagine you were a big Odyssey fan back then. After five years of the show, a series of fiction books was published with your favorite characters.

The novels reveal how everything got started in Odyssey. Think of them as a prequel, like Star Wars Episode 1.

Only Jar Jar is not in the Odyssey novels, and the dialogue is a whole lot better. Well anyway, the series turned out to be 12 books. But sadly, these books went out of print.

Now the big news is, the adventures and Odyssey novels are now available again. The stories have been updated, and instead of 12 books, all the stories fit in three mega books.

Now you can impress your friends by reading a big, hefty book.

We've got Paul McCusker, writer of all three mega books, standing by to talk about the series. Josh, what'd you find out about him?

Thanks, Jesse. I'm here with Paul McCusker, author of the adventures and Odyssey novels. Paul, how did the idea of adventures and Odyssey novels get started?

Well, I think early in the show, after we hit our stride with the audio program, we began to talk about other things that we could do with the town of Odyssey and all the characters.

And I think it was around that time that the idea came up for the animated videos and that sort of thing. So it was sort of a given.

Novels made sense to us, and so I got tagged to do them.

Are you written nearly a hundred episodes of the radio show when the first novel released in 1992? What's different about writing novels and writing for the radio show?

Well, with novels, of course, you have to explain a lot more. I mean, when you're doing a script for whether it's radio or you're doing it for film or television or whatever, so much of what happens is done through the dialogue through character.

And certainly, yes, sound effects, the visuals, if it's going to be for screen. Whereas, of course, the first thing that I came up against was the realization that I had to describe these characters.

I had to describe what this shop called Witzend looked like. And it was tougher than I thought it would be. Even down to little things like he said, she said.

There's a point where you can get carried away saying things like he said effusively or things that you take for granted because the actors are going to do that job.

So that was my first lesson in writing that kind of prose was you can't leave anything assumed in the later novels. Jack Davis and Jimmy Barclay from the radio show show up.

Now, are these original stories or are they adapted from the radio show?

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