Hi hi hi anon!!! I do think I've said this before but it doesn't make it any less true, but I love when my podfics can help people or keep them company while they do other things!! It makes me very happy to be able to be there for you in that way. It makes me feel closer to my listeners as I love audiobooks (and podfics!!!) and can listen to them over and over without ever getting tired of them.

Answering questions about my recording, editing, and character process is one of my favorite past times, honestly! I could probably go on and on, so I'll try to keep it short! First of all, I think I've said this before but I usually know if I want to record something by an author about one or two paragraphs into a story! There have been a fewwww occasions where this did not hold true but it's been maybe 1/50 times where something in the story has jarred me so much I changed my mind. I say all of this to say that my character work comes from how many times I've read the story! when I podfic something it's because I love the story and characters and can't get them out of my head. so like, for example, with heavyweight (one of my favorite podfics I've ever recorded) there was a point where I could retell the story without looking at the fic itself because I had reread it so much. that just means that I know the dialogue in my head and that I have (what I hope) is a really good grasp on how the dialogue, tension, and speed of the story should flow!! one of my favorite things to record and have people notice/mention in comments is flow!!!! like YES this flow change was intentional and you catching it makes me feel cool like a cucumber!!!!!! yes, I DID want your heart to race with me!!! there were a couple scenes in heavyweight that the flow changed and one of my friends commented to me about it and I think I was on a high the rest of the day!! full disclosure though; anytime someone notices technique it just tickles me. like, legitimately. I get all giggly and annoy my podficcer friends about it in discord. lol

as for the recording process!!! I usually wait until the evening time when things have settled both inside my house (dog and cats are asleep) and the outside is typically pretty quiet. UNFORTUNATELY I now record next to a huge window in my office (I just moved, so I'm trying to figure out the best place to record) and the city traffic/sounds have been cramping my style a lot. I'm probably going to clear out my walk-in closet and get some foam panels to make a little set up in there to see if this fixes some of my quality issues lately. caveat to this; I have been told that I'm the only one that hears a quality difference, so none of my recent podfics have suffered but I'm a bit of a perfectionist and my ears are very, very sensitive. uhhhhh I do not think this is what you meant when you asked about my recording process, sorry!!! recording is pretty easy! once I have the desired level of quiet in my house, I record about 8ish seconds of silence and then record. I use a method called 'punch and roll' and all that means is that I record the story as written and when I misread a line or don't quiet hit the tone I was looking for, I cut the part and re-record it as I'm recording. other podficcers wait until they're in editing and just read straight through when they mess up and just re-read the line and cut it in editing. I find that my editing process is already long enough without adding more lines to fix like this, so I stopped recording this way about two years ago?

my editing process is one that is constantly changing! every day I learn a new technique or something on one of the podficcer discord servers is discussed and I either take it as is, or I take bits and pieces and apply it to my editing routine to make my sound better! one of my favorite new techniques that pezza (one of my closest friends and also a podficcer) taught me had to do with fixing plosives in my podfics! plosives are like, when a P or sometimes a T, C, K pops loudly in a fic and you hear like a little puff of air. LOTS of podcasters don't actually worry about these things, but I find them very distracting when they're very noisy in a podfic, so pezza taught me how to edit these out in audacity and I do think it's made a difference on the quality of my podfic! there's also a lot of discussion on the podfic servers about breathing in fic and as a personal opinion this is something that I do take out of my podfic in the editing process, again because I find it very distracting. however, you will notice that there are a lot of good podficcers that don't do all these things and their podfics are still stellar. I think my obsession with clarity and quality of my podfic has a lot to do with my adhd and my obsessive need for perfection. anyway a lot of my editing process is basically down to a science; I run noise reduction, I run the same routine (it's called a macro) against all my fics (it's like a little application that runs processes in order), then I cut empty silence, normalize/equalize my sound to a certain db, and then manually edit the fic for plosives, mouth noises, and flow between sentences/paragraphs.

very important side note: what I do does not necessarily work for all podficcers and is not in any way meant to suggest that this is the 'right' way. this is what works for me!

I wrote you a book!! oh my gosh I am so sorry!!!!!! but also, sincerely, thank you because talking about all this has really jazzed me to get back to editing the two podfics I had to put down yesterday because of sound issues. I was almost in tears and now I feel like I can conquer them with a clear head this afternoon!!! let me apologize about fifteen more times for the book I just wrote you, because my favorite thing in the world is to talk to ANYONE about my podficcing process. thank you thank you thank you for asking me and being interested! I hope you have an absolutely lovely day! I'm gonna go tackle these two fics with renewed vigor!! <3<3