Confession: many people have told me to read my writing out loud as a self-editing exercise. I never did it.
I’ve read an awkward line or two as I struggled for better wording. But I’ve never read one of my works out loud from start to finish.
Last week, I read my new steampunk short to record audio for the podcast version of the story. (It’ll go live sometime in April, I believe.) during the course of the reading, I found several typos, an orphan word or two left behind in the flurry of track changes, and I realized the hero’s name changed in Scene 3. None of us noticed, not me or the editors! A beta reader had noticed and I’d thought I’d gone through and made the changes but apparently had missed Scene 3. Whoops.
If it hadn’t been for the need to read the story out loud to record audio, I’d never have found those mistakes. And the name swap was a big one. Lesson learned and I’ll think about reading my work out loud in the future, a scene at a time.
Recording for audio gave me no small amount of anxiety. To me, I sound like a chipmunk. Since this steampunk short draws heavily on Thai mythology and in fact, is set in Thailand, I figured I sounded like a Thai chipmunk.
To prepare, I listened to the podcasts of the Tales from the Archives Volume One. The podcast productions are quite well done and I wanted to provide audio to match their sound quality. But I’ve never done podcasts before and didn’t have the equipment. On Tee’s advice, I kept it simple and clean.
Software: Audacity
Free. (Important!) Cross- platform (meaning it can be for PC, Mac, Linux, etc.)
Simple to use with the ability to record, cut, copy, and splice sound tracks.
Using Audacity for software, I recorded my voice using the mic on my SteelSeries Siberia V2 headset. I could have used the built-in mic on my laptop, but the level of ambient noise would’ve been much higher and I wanted to give Tee and Pip the cleanest audio I could manage. The mic on the headset captured my voice much better. Additionally, I sat in my closet during the reading for additional sound buffer from ambient noises around my apartment or coming from neighboring apartments.
Finally, I split my files by scene. The shorter the reading, the fewer mistakes in each. Also, splitting by scene kept file sizes manageable.
My final, high quality mp3 files ranged between 11 Mb and 30 Mb depending on length of scene. Some of these exceeded the maximum file size limit on Gmail, so it was a good thing we were transferring files via Dropbox.
Hopefully, these will be the foundation for my podcast reading of “A Swan in Siam” as a part of Tales from the Archives Volume Two, to be released sometime around April.