I’ve been recording the audio version of This Messy Magnificent Life. (I still like it. That’s a relief).
For those of you who wonder what recording a book looks like, here’s what happens: John and Jesse, the engineers and director start setting up half an hour before the recording. Then I sit down before a music stand with the pages of the book on it, and start reading. If there is the sound of a wind chime or a bird or, as it was the other day, of rain falling, we start again. Because we are doing it in my home instead of a studio, there is always the chance that Izzy will start barking. The other day, as she was curled up on her bed in the sun room (which is where we are recording), she yawned rather loudly and we had to start that sentence again. There's a photo here, too, of Koko the gorilla testing out the equipment.
It’s a lovely thing to do — recording the book. I get to read it all over again and notice the words that I chose, some of which I wish I hadn’t. But that is part of it, as well. It’s always part of it. Taking it all in and proceeding with what’s good and could use, um, a bit of a change that it is too late to change. Anyway, I’m loving the process and it’s quite lengthy. It took three hours to go through 74 pages. Somehow, in the middle of it, I suddenly developed a lisp so we had to record and record and record until my mouth and tongue decided that lisping might not have been the best thing to do then. As always, I am so looking forward to you reading the book.
Here are a few lines from TMML: For the longest time I clung to the conviction that scary thoughts are created by scary situations … I couldn’t tell the difference between my stories of a situation and the situation itself.
