This'll be a short one. The last couple of days have been difficult--for whatever reason, the fatigue has been higher than normal. I tell you, there's little worse than having only about six good hours in a day. Unless, of course, it's having those six hours be somewhere between 8pm and 2am...
I thought it might be nice to write something about the actual book I'm working on, since this is at least supposed to be a blog having to do with my narration work. Tonight I finished editing together the raw audio for chapter ten (of sixteen), which puts me at a total of just over four and a half hours of "finished" audio out of a projected 6.1 hours--at least according to ACX's (doubtless automated) formula. I put "finished" in quotation marks because the publisher has an audio guy who will, once I'm done with all the rough edits, run a final noise reduction/compression/other magic stuff pass.
It's nice to be on the downhill slope, though. This fledgling career still feels more than half like a dream, and the frustration of losing literally months of work time should ease off a bit once I actually get a book out there and (hopefully) selling.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
The Price of Dreams
So I've talked a bit about what a long process it's been getting here, and how awesome it feels to finally be moving towards doing something creative with my life again. But I glossed over, at least a little, the reasons why it took so long to get to recording this book and even writing this blog. I thought I'd use this entry to explain a bit about what those reasons are.
My wife always had problems with her feet. They'd ache after a long day shopping or cooking. But it was never serious, until about 8 or 9 years ago. A combination of an exercise program that apparently was over-stressful, and some ill-advised moving of heavy furniture caused her feet to--let's say--"blow up" on her. She developed chronic plantar fasciitis and bursitis in both feet. She went through several surgeries and various therapies (some of which even made them worse), and ended up with the physical problem cured, but chronic nerve pain in her feet. The long and short of it was that she spent a bit over a year practically on bed rest, and even afterwards, her mobility is very limited. She can't be on her feet, or even have them down on the floor (as in sitting) for a very long time without them hurting terribly.
This would be stressful enough, but add to that the fact that we were busy raising my stepson, who is high-functioning autistic. Yeah, there are stories there. About three years ago, things got so hard at home that we had to send him to a treatment program out-of-state for several months. That was a low point for all of us. It ended up making a big difference in his behavior, and we were able to get him moved into an adult placement and living outside our house (he's now 21, so it's not like we sent our tiny kid away, mind you); he has a good shot at establishing a happy adult life. But you can imagine it's made things extra-fun at home.. and we think that stress contributed to my wife coming down with fibromyalgia and arthritis in her hands a little over a year ago.
Now, I love my wife fiercely. We've known each other since our high school days, which means more than half our lives now, and we spent 10 years pining for each other and marrying other folks before we could get together. We've always been the best of friends, and can have more fun just sitting on the couch with each other than I ever had--doing anything--with anyone else. So you might imagine that I wouldn't be terribly happy about her being loaded with all these burdens, and you'd be right.
As my wife's health has deteriorated, more and more of the household duties have fallen to me. I don't mind that as such, but over the last couple of years, work had become more and more stressful as well. I'd become the lead of a development team focused on a payment gateway application that we took over from another team, and that was already deployed in several customer sites. As we found our footing in the new codebase, we had to deal with customer support issues. A customer relationship that somehow ended up become very toxic led to many many late nights and weekends, and was perhaps epitomized by an early morning conference call with a customer VP literally interrupting our troubleshooting attempts to yell at all of us and tell us how he was tired of us "running away" every time there was a problem.
That kind of stuff adds up, leading to things like, oh, I don't know... deciding to become an audiobook narrator. But it also seems to have a nasty way of wearing you down. Right when I was getting things moving in the narration field, I came down with a series of sinus infections, from which it seemed like I just couldn't recover. I got to the point where I felt as though I was constantly swimming through syrup just to get through the day, the fatigue was so bad. After several visits to (basically) urgent care, and several courses of antibiotics, our new doctor finally ordered about four pints (okay, maybe not that much, but...) of blood drawn and a boatload of tests.
Turns out I'd developed some serious vitamin deficiencies, which at least is easily treatable, but it can take months to recover. So just at the point where I felt like I was getting going, my gearshift was stuck in first! Everything just dragged. Even though I'd get energized whenever I did anything voice-related, it was often hard to break the fatigue and inertia long enough to make the long trek upstairs to my studio--leaving my new career to develop at a glacial pace.
Well, that's the short and long of it. Obviously I'm at least a bit recovered, or I wouldn't even be trying to do this. But if you read my last post and thought, "Why did it take you so long to get this going?" then here's your answer. And if it takes me a little longer than I'd like to post updates... now you know why.
My wife always had problems with her feet. They'd ache after a long day shopping or cooking. But it was never serious, until about 8 or 9 years ago. A combination of an exercise program that apparently was over-stressful, and some ill-advised moving of heavy furniture caused her feet to--let's say--"blow up" on her. She developed chronic plantar fasciitis and bursitis in both feet. She went through several surgeries and various therapies (some of which even made them worse), and ended up with the physical problem cured, but chronic nerve pain in her feet. The long and short of it was that she spent a bit over a year practically on bed rest, and even afterwards, her mobility is very limited. She can't be on her feet, or even have them down on the floor (as in sitting) for a very long time without them hurting terribly.
This would be stressful enough, but add to that the fact that we were busy raising my stepson, who is high-functioning autistic. Yeah, there are stories there. About three years ago, things got so hard at home that we had to send him to a treatment program out-of-state for several months. That was a low point for all of us. It ended up making a big difference in his behavior, and we were able to get him moved into an adult placement and living outside our house (he's now 21, so it's not like we sent our tiny kid away, mind you); he has a good shot at establishing a happy adult life. But you can imagine it's made things extra-fun at home.. and we think that stress contributed to my wife coming down with fibromyalgia and arthritis in her hands a little over a year ago.
Now, I love my wife fiercely. We've known each other since our high school days, which means more than half our lives now, and we spent 10 years pining for each other and marrying other folks before we could get together. We've always been the best of friends, and can have more fun just sitting on the couch with each other than I ever had--doing anything--with anyone else. So you might imagine that I wouldn't be terribly happy about her being loaded with all these burdens, and you'd be right.
As my wife's health has deteriorated, more and more of the household duties have fallen to me. I don't mind that as such, but over the last couple of years, work had become more and more stressful as well. I'd become the lead of a development team focused on a payment gateway application that we took over from another team, and that was already deployed in several customer sites. As we found our footing in the new codebase, we had to deal with customer support issues. A customer relationship that somehow ended up become very toxic led to many many late nights and weekends, and was perhaps epitomized by an early morning conference call with a customer VP literally interrupting our troubleshooting attempts to yell at all of us and tell us how he was tired of us "running away" every time there was a problem.
That kind of stuff adds up, leading to things like, oh, I don't know... deciding to become an audiobook narrator. But it also seems to have a nasty way of wearing you down. Right when I was getting things moving in the narration field, I came down with a series of sinus infections, from which it seemed like I just couldn't recover. I got to the point where I felt as though I was constantly swimming through syrup just to get through the day, the fatigue was so bad. After several visits to (basically) urgent care, and several courses of antibiotics, our new doctor finally ordered about four pints (okay, maybe not that much, but...) of blood drawn and a boatload of tests.
Turns out I'd developed some serious vitamin deficiencies, which at least is easily treatable, but it can take months to recover. So just at the point where I felt like I was getting going, my gearshift was stuck in first! Everything just dragged. Even though I'd get energized whenever I did anything voice-related, it was often hard to break the fatigue and inertia long enough to make the long trek upstairs to my studio--leaving my new career to develop at a glacial pace.
Well, that's the short and long of it. Obviously I'm at least a bit recovered, or I wouldn't even be trying to do this. But if you read my last post and thought, "Why did it take you so long to get this going?" then here's your answer. And if it takes me a little longer than I'd like to post updates... now you know why.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
(Why, yes, I) Want to be Starting Something...
So, this has been a long time coming. In point of fact, I've been meaning to start writing this blog since at least last August--but life, as always, has gotten in the way.
Folks who have only known me since, oh, let's say the early nineties, probably think of me as a software engineer. Hopefully a really good one, since I've made a pretty decent career of it, but that's about the extent of it. Folks who have known me a bit longer than that might remember that, in high school and college, I actually had a completely different set of plans for how my life was supposed to go.
I spent a lot of time training in musical theater, in dance (wasn't so great at that part), and voice--yeah, I sang a pretty mean aria for a while there. I had hoped to have some kind of career in performing, or failing that, at least in college-level music education. But, when I got married for the first time, I felt that I needed a steady income, and more or less gave up on those dreams to focus on software development.
(I feel compelled to add that those few who've known me since about the fourth grade will be aware that, in fact, computers and programming have also been one of my great loves... a fact that played no small part in that decision, and that has allowed me to succeed in this path)
So the last nineteen years have been good, in a lot of ways. I'm proud of what I've accomplished. But the last three years in particular have seen a lot of challenges, and I've been giving some serious thought to where I want my life to go from here.
About two years ago, I noticed a tweet from the prolific Neil Gaiman mentioning something called the Audiobook Creation Exchange, or ACX. It's a platform that allows authors and/or publishers to contract with individual narrators to produce recordings of their audiobooks. He linked to a blog by a man who had successfully started narrating books with some simple training, and I thought to myself, "Hey! I could totally do that!"
I kept the idea in the back of my mind, and as things at home and work became more and more stressful, I'd come back to ACX every so often. Finally, in June of last year, I decided to do more than just wonder. The original blog I'd read mentioned that this gentleman (whose name I can't recall now... sorry, my friend!) had gotten pointers and training from a fellow named Pat Fraley, who was--happily for me--based in the Los Angeles area. I sent an email to Pat, describing my situation, my hopes and dreams, and asking him for some advice.
As I now have the pleasure of knowing, Pat has to be one of the kindest, most genuine people you could ever hope to meet, and he responded with some encouragement and ideas for training that might be a good fit for me. To make an already-too-long story a tiny bit shorter, I've been able to attend several classes that Pat has held, and to learn from him and some other luminaries in the voice-over/audiobook worlds, and with a great audiobook demo "reel" under my belt, got my profile started on ACX.
I've been fortunate enough to land a contract to produce a book through the site, about which I'm very happy(and will doubtless be posting more soon). So a whole new chapter in my life is opening up--one where I have the opportunity to get back to being creative, to really performing and making art--and I frankly couldn't be more excited.
I hope to use this blog to document my journey, and to share large and small things about the process. If I'm able to pass on any useful information, or to inspire anyone else out there to take a step towards their dreams, then I'll count myself lucky indeed.
I kept the idea in the back of my mind, and as things at home and work became more and more stressful, I'd come back to ACX every so often. Finally, in June of last year, I decided to do more than just wonder. The original blog I'd read mentioned that this gentleman (whose name I can't recall now... sorry, my friend!) had gotten pointers and training from a fellow named Pat Fraley, who was--happily for me--based in the Los Angeles area. I sent an email to Pat, describing my situation, my hopes and dreams, and asking him for some advice.
As I now have the pleasure of knowing, Pat has to be one of the kindest, most genuine people you could ever hope to meet, and he responded with some encouragement and ideas for training that might be a good fit for me. To make an already-too-long story a tiny bit shorter, I've been able to attend several classes that Pat has held, and to learn from him and some other luminaries in the voice-over/audiobook worlds, and with a great audiobook demo "reel" under my belt, got my profile started on ACX.
I've been fortunate enough to land a contract to produce a book through the site, about which I'm very happy(and will doubtless be posting more soon). So a whole new chapter in my life is opening up--one where I have the opportunity to get back to being creative, to really performing and making art--and I frankly couldn't be more excited.
I hope to use this blog to document my journey, and to share large and small things about the process. If I'm able to pass on any useful information, or to inspire anyone else out there to take a step towards their dreams, then I'll count myself lucky indeed.
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