Your First Audiobook Part 2

The stress of preparing an audiobook can be high. Sometimes you need to cut loose. Sometimes it's enough to tie Wymore to the grill of a car take a little joy ride.

But that's neither here nor there.

The second week of recording went better. I practiced Friday night again. This time, I added a new practice on Saturday. I didn't read aloud. I didn't whisper either (whispering is worse for your voice than reading aloud). Instead, I mouthed through all the text without vocalizing. When I hit a trouble sentence, I repeated it over and over until my mouth and tongue got used to forming those words, in that order.

I don't know if it was that or if I just got better at the process, but at the recording the next day, my error rate was much lower, more like four a page.

Maybe I should be more accurate about describing that, in case anyone out there laments they can't do as well. When I say four a page, I mean four times we had to roll back. When I restart if I flub it again, it's trivial for the audio tech to delete that and give me another run at it. I probably averaged two tries per edit, maybe two and a half. It's easy to call foul and try again on the subsequent retries.

We probably covered about as much ground on that second day, but I think we only got an hour or so of real recording in. So the time was more productive, we just didn't have as much of it.

The third week doesn't warrant a full post, so I'll cover it here. I practiced Friday. I practiced again Saturday. Sunday morning I woke up in agony with some kind of stomach bug. For four hours I couldn't sit or lie down for more than a few minutes at a time. I was miserable, and I finally got to the point where I could sleep again about the time I was supposed to wake up. Since we don't have a hard deadline, I cancelled the recording rather than producing crap. Since there were only three of us on Hold 322 that day, I did go in for that.

As I write this, we're soon going to do week three for real. However, I expect to start having less new information about the recordings to post, so next week, I'll probably discuss Salt Lake Comic Con and cons in general.

Until then.