January Sweeps - Day 362

I spent a couple of hours today uploading my "My Friend of Misery" files to Audible.   

I was trying to make getting that out there my priority for this month, but wow, they flagged both the Opening Titles and Chapter 1 as being too quiet.  I raised the volume on the titles, and re-sent it, and it got kicked back again (they tell you just how many decibels too loud or too quiet the files are, so that helped me figure out exactly what they're looking for.*

This was my temporary cover, which I don't mind so much

So, I'm going to boost the volume on all the files, and see if I can't get them to accept them.  It's way better that they flag stuff like that immediately (so you can fix it), instead of having to wait weeks for them to kick it back, saying the volume is too low (which is how it used to work).

Funnily enough, when I crank up the volume on these files, the background hiss tends to get louder too, so I gotta fix that on every file (which is not a big deal, but just time consuming).  I think I'll take a break (at least to go to the bathroom), once the upload reaches one hour.  

My sketch for the cover with notes for Gino

On the chapters where all I had to do was raise the volume, they took about a minute each.  It felt enormously good to see the total book length go up with each chapter (hard to describe why).  Then I set the goal of two hours.

Sit-ups Today: 100 (sit-ups were hard today, not sure why)
Sit-ups In January: 3209

I kept going, splicing in the little changes I made the other night based on the notes I got back from beta listeners (clarifying lines here or there, changing "agent" to "manager," changing "people are dead" to "a man is dead," changing "she hit it off with another student" to "she became friends with another student," etc.), and only quit when I had the first two hours and five minutes uploaded and past inspection.

Push-ups Today: 127
Push-ups In January: 2463

I got to the library with an hour to spare, and was about to work on my outpost pandemic story, but I was thinking I would record "Meet The New Clerk, Same As The Old Clerk," which I believe is the next story I wrote in the "Dead & Breakfast" series (in between "Never Let Him Go" and "Sucker For Mystery"), but it looks like I've got it wrong, and "Sucker" was written first.

Either way, I'm gonna give Meeshelle a last name right now.  Arbitrarily, it is now Lovett.  So, there's that.

I was in a somewhat foul mood when I got here.  I ran over to the storage unit to throw a couple of boxes in, and when I tried to close the door, the handle must have snagged on a bag or something, because a bunch of the stack came pouring down, and once I got it re-stacked, something was still shifted so the rolling door wouldn't slide closed.  When I was going to the cabin every week, I'd sometimes take a few bags of toys to take out of the package, then I'd burn the cardboard in the fireplace.  I need to start doing that again.

Anyway, I've been sitting here for a little while, working on my story (I haven't managed many words, mostly just revising dialogue from an earlier scene), and I realized that my bad mood pretty much faded away, due to concentrating on the creative process.  

At the end of the night, with most of my work finished, I sat down and started recording "Suckers For Mystery."  It's short--about nine thousand words--and is a really inconsequential story (aren't they all, though?  Except for the damn novel, and even then . . .), but it gives Mason, Natalie, and Meeshelle equal parts in the story, and that's fun.  Realizing I had two Mason sections back-to-back, I decided to give a character named Lolly her own scene, having discovered her as another day clerk in reading "Never Let Him Go."  That was enough to push it over ten thousand, but by that point, I was too tired to record anymore.  So that's that.

Words Today: 879

Words In January: 20,948

*I've been told many times that my audio files are too quiet, but because I tend to yell or do loud child and witch voices, I don't want them to red-line (or whatever it is Big calls it, that I've forgotten).  But this has to be to my detriment (although you can always boost the volume of an audio file--if it's too loud [and "pegging," that's Big's news word] the audio gets distorted and you can't fix it by lowering the volume).