Different is Good
17APR2024
17APR 2024 - After recording the audio-book version of the novel, “The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County”, the files went out for quality checks. I’ve been getting funny notes from the QA/QC person. Well she tells me she is laughing. I tell myself, the book is funny.
She had another message for me. With rapt attention, she reads my words and listens to my voice. She tells me that they don’t match. She loves the story and I seem to be coherent and flowing, but like a jazz musician, the audio is more performative than literal. Good? Bad? She encouraged me to write then record a message to the listeners. It goes like this:
I offer you my thanks for buying and listening to The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County. I am Aiken, the author and narrator. Friends and family call me Christina.
One of the production team pointed out that this left-handed dyslexic author (me), occasionally did not read her own words correctly. Just in case you are the sort of follows an audio book with a print edition open, please enjoy the mild variations between the spoken version and the written version. It’s the same story. The deviations are minor.
I re-read this post from a year ago after having made some surgical edits to novel #2, “Stolen Mountain”. An beta reader (listener, technically) said, I lost track of who Regina was. I added four sentences to 102,000 words is trivial. Adding 4 sentences into 13 hours of audio, a little tougher. Read, record in the studio (upstairs), clean the tape, then find that same sentence, or graph, in the 21 chapter-based recordings. Listen, listen again. Mark your splice. Listen to the new audio for quality. Then lift it and paste where the old audio sat. Balance levels. Listen to a full page of text, save it, the move on.
It is funny work for an author to do. But we’re not authors anymore. We are solo entrepreneurs. We are content creators. I am the master of a multi-media communications domain (me and my six readers/listeners). Still better than removing sheet rock from walls in the apartment over the garage — which is where I must go next.