My First Audio Book

For the longest time (as they say), those who know and love me have said, "My my Tony, you have such a lovely voice, could we have a recording of it?"

This may not be strictly what they said, but the gist was plain. After some humming, and a little hawing, and a non-trivial amount of havering I got a Yeti Blue USB microphone. I have spent the last few days messing around with this.

I have a number of discoveries to report. Firstly, I always knew that reading my writing aloud helped with rhythm and flow. You just gotta get the cadences right. And then when I was reading out loud for recording, it really helped me refine the flow of the written word.  So that was one thing.

The next thing was that my front room is incredibly noisy. I didn't even know. The traffic sound from outside is stupidly loud. Why are they driving past my house anyway? Then this morning some kind of light aircraft buzzed the house. I was sitting with the curtains drawn and shutters shut, but still it must have known I was in there.  Also children running by. Adults swearing. Then the headphones give a little buzz every now and again. I know I'm writing in fragments and some of the more punctilious readers of my books say they don't like fragments but that's another post. Cormac McCarthy does them, Charles Dickens did them. I can do them.  I have been dipping into a great book by the way - The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth - and he says it's ok to use fragments (not in so many words). So I will continue to use fragments.

Anyway, that was a digression from the audio book. My front room is not the perfect studio. It will not be able to produce sound files of sufficient quality (that is with no background noise) so that I can upload audiobooks via Amazon. I'd like to do that and I am scouting another studio. I am thinking of my mother's airing cupboard. I said that to her and she says, "Do you want all the linen and clothes in there?" I replied, "Most certainly; they will damp shit down."

Also, I now see a future stretching ahead of me as a voice narrator. Apparently you can make tons of money narrating other peoples' books. Mind you they might not want my Northern English accent. I noticed I dropped a few Ts and a couple of Hs. Although I can see a new genre of gritty Northern smut being narrated:

"Eh up, our Ethel. Get tha' kit off, sharpish."
"Weel, hinny, ah nivver kna'd ye cared, like. Eh, divvn't dee that!"

I have been practising my Dumfries-shire accent too. The main character would have to be called Ken, ye ken? And everything would happen "the noo".

But I digress again. What was I saying? Audiobooks! The new future. I am cautious about most stuff these days, but where there's an airing cupboard there's a way, as my auld mam says.

Oh, yeah - a link to my soundcloud audio book:

A Christmas Ghost Story

It's about 25 minutes long .... and FREE!!!!