Audiobook Back Underway

We took a week off for Easter. Families. You know how it is. Today (well, yesterday when you read this), we started recording again in earnest. Discovered I'd forgotten to record the dedication of the book and that I'd probably better add a reader's note about ellipsis because I do things with ellipsis in book two that I'll just need to read aloud in the audio version. Then we launched into recording.

I talked about this the first time, but it's been a while. We use "bump and roll" editing, where we correct mistakes as I make them. Basically, if I flub a line, we back up right there and I take the line again so that when he starts editing, he's starting with one more or less good performance and just processing the finished sound and taking out weird, incidental noises. (I bet I make that sound way easier than it is).

So my judge of how well I'm doing is how often I've stopped momentum with one of my mistakes, and I can tell you right now the number one thing that causes me to make a mistake. It's acting. If I make a mistake, it's ten times more likely to be in dialog or in more impassioned POV narrative than a wind-up introduction. I think I went two or three pages in chapter one without a single mistake, and every one of those involved me voice acting dialog. When you're acting, you speed up a little. Your emotional brain connects and begins to anticipate words more, and those aren't always the words actually on the page. Often you find yourself halfway through a sentence and realize it isn't the sentence written. At least I do.

But for how we did? We hit our stride. We probably did better today than we did most days in book 1. I feel like we're getting better at this, and I had feared we'd have to learn how to do it all over again.

Anyway, we had a bit of a run up to get started again, but we recorded one fifteenth of the book today. I'm happy with the progress. I'll try to get a full ten percent next time. If I can hit that every week, I'll know that my sleep Sunday mornings are numbered.

And also, I won't have to read Fox in Sox two times a day every damn day like the producer makes me do while recording. I hate that damned book. Hate it. Hate it.