Accent on narration

So I'm working with my teacher Pat Fraley via one of his excellent home study courses, and the last piece of "homework" had me recording an excerpt, all narration, involving a dog stolen (or rescued) out of the back of a pickup truck. I got in the studio, recorded the piece, did a tiny bit of editing to cut my couple of takes and silence down to a single useful track, and sent it off.

Pat, as always, sent back some kind and helpful remarks, but one of them was particularly interesting: he observed that it sounded as though I kept wanting to fall into an accent of some kind for the narration (happily for me, I just barely avoided doing that). I laughed when I read that, because I realized he was exactly right... I guess something about the whole pickup-truck-and-stolen-dog setup just put my voice into a particular cadence that was way too close to a Southern accent. But the funny part is that the reason that was an issue didn't quite sink in until today.

I had thought to myself, "Oh, sure. I probably shouldn't go into an accent because it'd be distracting from the story, from the narrative technique I'm trying to practice in this lesson."

Um... no. Finishing up my day at the office today, and thinking about writing this post as I listened to the next lesson in the course, it hit me like a wet fish: "No, you idiot, you don't want to use an accent because the narrator isn't one of the characters."

Granted, you want your narration to have some connection to the characters, some "tude", as Pat says. But the narrator in a third-person narrative is far more likely to be you, telling the story, than to be someone actually in the story.

Guess that's why he makes the big bucks...

Here's to progress!

I'm happy to report that, after some much-needed medical leave for downtime, I got notice from the publisher for "Book Number One" that he was done with my recorded audio files. He sent them over to me, I uploaded them to ACX, and a few clicks of our respective mice later, my first title is now officially in QA--which, according to ACX, can take "upwards of 10-14 days". (Why provide a range, then say it can take "upwards" of the range? Do they mean it can take 10-14 days, or that it can take upwards of 14 days? Or something else? The mind boggles.)

In any case, I'm now into "final countdown" for actually having a book out there, and because this book is the first of a series, I've already contracted to produce the second in the series!

I know that technically I could probably tell you all (my "extensive" audience) what the book is, but I guess I'm superstitious. Somehow it feels like I'd be jinxing it to put it out there right now. So what do I feel comfortable saying?

Well, I can say that this book is one by a well-known author, and that I actually remember seeing it and its sequels in a bookstore back in the 80s--probably a Waldenbooks in Plaza Bonita--and really wanting to read them. It's a satirical fantasy story: think something like "The Princess Bride", but with less overt romance, and much wackier. There's practically a cast of thousands--some chapters, I swear I had to come up with ten or more distinct voices in a single scene! And, perhaps most importantly, I had a blast reading it and I can't wait to record the second title in the series.

So wish me luck with the QA process. Hopefully very soon, I'll be able to let the world share in the fun I had recording my first audiobook.

Fatigue's a [deleted], and some actual work

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.