So was I! I just finished recording the audiobook Romp! at Digital One Sound Studio in Portland, Oregon, with the funny and clever Josh Millman, the Senior Sound Engineer, and also the person who recorded the voice for Wii Sports! Directed by Beth Hicks and produced by Julianna Wilson through Penguin Random House Audio.

The director and the studio engineer are both in your ear as you record. So if I scratched my nose and you could hear it on the recording, Josh alerted me to reread. When I made a mistake like leaving out, mispronouncing, or adding a word that wasn’t there, Beth also asked me to reread. She also took “script notes,” so if I caught my own mistakes and I reread a section, she made a note for the editor of where that occurred.

I did my own pronunciation research on the Latin words I did not know, as well as Lingít (Tlingit) and Salishan words, using YouTube channel guides to help. My favorite is Dr. X̱’unei Lance Twitchell, an Associate Professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast (my alma mater (BA, Social Sciences) for my gap year before graduate school, after completing my BS in Zoology at WSU). I wish I had found his website before the book was published. I have about a hundred questions. Dr. Twitchell has a great YouTube Channel to support Lingít language learning, hosted by Sealaska Heritage Institute. Lingít is a beautiful, DIFFICULT language. To learn more, go HERE.

Beth and Josh provided a lot of guidance on my Spanish. I referred to Caroline Leuchtenberger and her Projecto Ariranhas for Portuguese. I was diligent in trying to pronounce all the names and languages correctly to show respect for the Indigenous cultures referenced in the book, as well as the names and places. If I fell short, please know I made my best effort and forgive the failure.

Now that the first recording of the book is done, it will go to the editing studio. Where they have the unenviable task of weeding out all the repeated sentences, background noise, and quavers in my voice. I became a little emotional during a couple of chapters; you can hear it in the recording. Beth and I chose to keep that vulnerability in, but the hiccup in my voice and long breaths will be edited out.

Even after all of that, I may have to go back into the studio for a final read of the “pick-ups” areas, where even after editing, a sentence or two may sound wrong or contain an error. I am told those do not take more than an hour to fix. They play me the wrong sentence, and then I try to repeat it correctly in the same tone or cadence so it does not sound edited in the recorded book.

Here is a brief clip of the studio and process, the fun easy part….