At the bleeding edge of dependence
(Can we laugh at this?) Behind the scenes of recording an audiobook.
I don’t think I’ve ever had to pay attention to so many things at the same time.
Is there a helicopter flying over? Did I make any weird, smack-y mouth sounds? Did someone in the basement just wash their hands? Oh mercy, my stomach is growling again.
This past week, I recorded the audiobook for We Shall All Be Changed (the print book releases in less than one month on Feb. 6. As a thank you for reading, you can now find the Table of Contents & 1st chapter for free here!).
Like most writers, I like writing. And, like most humans, I do not love the sound of my own voice. I also did not love the niggling perfectionism that showed up in this particular process, nor the sheer amount of effort it took to record a clean, engaging, clear and miraculously-finished audiobook. (I am still waiting on edits or portions I may need to re-record, but the bulk is behind me.) I will now and forever give thanks for every audiobook and the effort and angst that likely went into producing it.
Perhaps you have questions about the audiobook process. Or maybe you’re like, “What’s the big deal? Don’t most authors read their own words for the audiobook?”
Let me regale you with my recently hard-won knowledge. The answer to the second question would be no, not necessarily. I had to audition to read mine, and that was no small effort. I had to figure out if I could even set up a professional-enough recording studio in my home to get the audio to sound, well, professional. Otherwise, I would need to pay an hourly rate for time in a professional recording studio. Since this was my first audiobook and I had no idea how many hours it would take me to record, that was not my first choice.
Enter the first dose of providential provision in this process: My church’s audio-visual guru and worship director, Kevin Jeanes. Kevin was so kind with his expertise and fancy-equipment lending that recording the book at home became a possibility.
Let me back up here and say that I have always wanted to at least try to record this audiobook in my voice. For one thing, I prefer nonfiction audiobooks that are read by the author. And this book felt so personal that I couldn’t really imagine someone else reading it. That said, I now know why many authors might not be able to record it themselves and would defer to professional voice actors—who can do the job in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the mistakes and headaches.
I knew that recording the audiobook would be hard. I did not know how much it would stretch and challenge me, or how much the Lord would ask me to depend on him for all the variables that need to go just so for a good-enough recording.
To start with, I had a very tight deadline. That’s partly because the audition and callback (yes, a second audition with a better mic) had taken a few weeks. So, I got word that I had gotten the part and that my recorded book would be due in less than three weeks… on the day my kids came home for a two-week holiday break, leaving me less than a week to do the deed. Y’all I knew this would happen. I had come to the point where I would be relieved if they didn’t give me the part and I could just say I’d tried. But lo, they did.
I did not know that we would also get strep throat and some crazy cold over the holidays. Though I probably should have? I got the part to use my voice to record the audiobook and, a week later, lost my voice entirely. I knew that I wouldn’t be recording over the holidays when my kids were home anyway (hello noise!), but I now had a new thing to worry and pray about: would my voice come back in time? (By God’s grace and the common grace of antibiotics for strep, it did.)
Because we were so sick, dear Kevin did a touchless drop-off of the sound equipment I’d be needing, so I’d need to set it up myself when the time came. The night before the kids went back to school, I roped my husband and brother-in-law into helping me nail blankets and foam twin mattresses over the window and door to absorb any excess sound (I shared a funny video of my “glamorous” closet studio here), but I was scared I wouldn’t be able to get the equipment set up myself. Miracle of miracles, I was able to!
Kids go back to school, studio is set up with less than a week to spare, and I ask my book prayer team to pray for all the things. I drink copious amounts of throat coat tea, sit down to record… and start learning firsthand about all the little things that can go wrong when you’re recording with a high-end mic that picks up everything. Every errant noise means you have to start the sentence over (I did punch-and-roll recording where you stop and record over the mistake.) Here’s what that looks like in real time…
Your stomach growls and the mic make it sound like an earthquake. You eat to fix this. Then your stomach starts making new noises while it digests what you just ate.
Your mouth gets dry. It could have been the coffee a few hours ago but what can you do about that now? Or maybe it’s the nerves. But that dry mouth-opening sound that you can barely hear with the naked ear? It gets straight-up offensive in a fancy mic, absolutely cringe-worthy. You guzzle gallons of water every few sentences to get through.
You realize you don’t know how to breathe. You used to. You do it all the time. But suddenly, with this mic in front of you picking up every hint of a breath, and you feel like breathing should no longer happen. You watch the videos that tell you to just breathe, the sound is fine, it’s natural, but you spend most of your day listening back to what you just recorded and wondering if your breath was too… breathy? And wanting to punch your past self for writing such long sentences with no places to breathe in them.
You push through all these internal thoughts and noises, only to come face to face with the external ones. You thought the kids being at school and the dog being put away would be enough, but noooooo. Suddenly, you realize you live in the LOUDEST NEIGHBORHOOD IN AMERICA. Maybe it wasn’t this loud before the leaves fell off all the trees and the highway and the railroad tracks basically moved into your backyard. Maybe it’s always been this loud and you never noticed.
Oh wait, the helicopters. You did know those would be a problem. You see, you live beneath the highway-in-the-sky for Fort Belvoir and med-evac copters, so there are times of day when they fly over pretty constantly, rattling the roof and windows. You knew you’d have to record around those. What you didn’t anticipate was:
The Jake Brakes. It starts raining and every single semi-truck on the highway that used to sound far away decides they need to use their loud Jake Brakes all day… and all night.
On your second day of recording, someone fires up what sounds like a jet engine or rock-crushing machine a few blocks from your house, over across the creek. By this point, you are so high strung about noise that you can’t just let it go…
I give up on recording over that noise on Friday afternoon and decide I will catch up on Saturday while the rest of my family goes to a rainy-day matinee. But, when I’m walking the dog that morning, the jet-engine noise starts again, and I must investigate. I look between the trees and try to echo-locate the sound. I start calling businesses near it to see if they know what it is and when it will stop. I call a couple places and they treat me like the insane person I have become. I ask myself, “Is this a distraction that I should stop chasing?” And then I say, “Okay, one more call.”
I call a funeral home near there and have the audacity to ask if they’re like, I don’t know, cremating or something, because I’m trying to record an audiobook here. A very kind woman named Ruth (my grandmother’s name) tells me, “No honey, we don’t do that here.” She tells me the noise is the department of transportation doing some work behind their building. And she asks, “What’s your book about?”
Well, wouldn’t you know that Ruth and I hit it off? She has a radio station or something for funeral professionals and she’d love to feature the book and share it with others. We make plans to meet up for lunch soon.
And the minute I get off the phone with Ruth, the noise stops. It doesn’t come back on the next day or the next. It has done its job. I journal that the call felt providential, that God must have known I would go into journalistic sleuth mode and not stop until I found the source of the noise… and that he must have set me up for this unexpected connection with a woman who would love to share this book with others.
This has been a long story, I know. But I tell it because a) I think it’s funny how neurotic I got about it and b) it’s so easy to forget the good. I want to remember how desperate I was for God’s help—how helpless I was to stop the outside forces preventing me from doing the thing he had given me to do that day. And I want to remember that God came through with a just-in-time provision, and an unexpected surprise.
That little chat with Ruth buoyed me when, the day before the recording was due—with just a couple chapters left to go—my power went out. I literally sat down to record and boom, no power. No mic. No discernable cause. My neighbor sent me this screenshot of just how narrow the outage was… basically just our neighborhood at just that moment.
I reached out to a couple text threads for prayer and backup plans, and then Kevin encouraged me to wait it out. It would be preferable not to move locations at this point in the game.
I took a much-needed breather. I surrendered and received, with a chuckle, the Lord’s timing. I did some other things. And soon enough, the power came back on. I finished the chapters that night and the acknowledgements the following morning (under some duress after seeing asphalt trucks parked nearby and fearing they were going to start jackhammering any moment!). And I finished the audiobook by the deadline, sola gratia.
Every time I’ve heard a helicopter since then, I am thankful I am not recording. Yet I am rehearsing the ways God kept me at the bleeding edge of dependence on him—so I could keep watch for his provision, yet again.
We Shall All Be Changed: How Facing Death with Loved Ones Transforms Us releases in less than one month on Feb. 6. As a thank you for reading, you can now find the Table of Contents & 1st chapter for free here!