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Day one (of three) of my audiobook record. I was going to have to read my own book, out loud, all the way through. It’s worth working hard on writing something that you have to read out, because if it’s shit, that’s the worst punishment possible. Luckily, I was hardly embarrassed at all. It’s pretty solid. I think it might actually be good.
I was in there for about seven hours and though we took breaks, none of them were very long. We got up to page 134 which is nearly halfway, so that augurs well for getting it finished early on Friday. It’s a very concentrated day’s work and my throat was a bit sore by the evening, but I think I did a good job. I struggled to get through a couple of bits as I had an emotional reaction to reliving some of it, but there are lots of laughs in this book and not too many sad bits.
It’s very much trying to look at the positive side of cancer.
We got into a bit of trouble for making too much noise during one of our breaks as the noise was bleeding through into the next studio (I hadn’t even realised there was another studio in the fairly tiny room we were in). It turned out that the voice artist working in the other studio was Siobhan Mcsweeney from off of Derry Girls, who I had met on one of Deborah Frances-White’s podcasts. It was good to see her again. I think she’s amazing. But we then created more problems for their record when I didn’t properly shut the door on my studio so again my loud voice bled into the recording of whatever audio book she was reading.
We did suggest that we swap studios for an hour and I read a bit of her book whilst she reads a bit of mine. It would have been quite a funny and confusing gag for our listeners, especially if we said nothing about it. But this is arduous enough a process without giving ourselves more work.
I am excited to be getting this book on audio though. We have done it early so we can spot any mistakes and poor writing, but so far have only seen a very few errors. Still good to catch them in time though. And I am impressed with how few bits of clumsy writing I’d let through the net.
In my breaks I made a start of signing 550 title pages for Waterstones customers. Rather than having to lug around 550 books, they just send you the title pages and those then get put into the books at the binding stage. It’s very clever. I hope the Waterstones customers won’t be disappointed to find that I have drawn a one balled cock in their books.
If you want one of these then preorder here We will, of course, be trying to do something special for those of you who want to buy from gofasterstripe.
