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This afternoon I drove up to Cambria to see if my voice will work for the audio book of J2M.

It was the first time Rick and I had met in person, so we chatted for a few minutes as we walked around to the studio, which takes up two small rooms above his garage.

Inside, I got settled on the couch with the text in front of me on a music stand. It took some some time to get the microphone just right. Then Rick went into the other room where his equipment is and I could see him putting on the headphones through the window. He signaled me to start reading.

Reading was much harder than I anticipated! I've read the beginning of this book aloud hundreds of times, but recording is a whole new game. For a start, there's no need to project your voice. The microphone is inches away and it catches everything, including the little pops of the p's and the sibilance of the s's and the sigh when you flub a line for the third time.

Reading for a recording is more like acting than reading. You have to give the characters unique voices, even if you don't "do voices," you have read slowly enough for the readers to absorb the dense imagery in the beginning of the book, and, if you are me, you have to modulate the long a's so nobody can tell you're from Philadelphia. (I didn't even know I said words like "nasty" in such a nasty way!)

We worked at it for a couple hours, recording two chapters in the end. It's clear that I'm going to have to practice (a lot!) to do this right, but I think we both feel that my voice will work in the end. I have some homework: to get a man and another woman (with a lower voice than mine) to do an informal reading of the same material so we can compare. If I like either one better, we'll try to find a professional actor to do the reading.

Rick gave me a copy of today's reading on a CD and I popped it into the car player on the way home. Some of those a's really made me cringe, but you know? All in all, it doesn't sound too bad.

Right now I think this is going to work!