I'm being haunted!

[AwkwardMD]

The VA has already supplied the corrected sections. There were 7 in total, although one was actually my fault.

I had attempted to make a final pass of edits on Out before putting it in her hands. Some of the edits were custom for the recording. I used font size in a few sections to help her understand the intended volume. small text for a soft voice and large for emphasis. Lit doesn't allow font variations, and I got it in my head it was better to make these changes in a copy in case I wanted to submit these changes to be published. In my head, at the time, it made perfect sense to do it this way.

When I was 80% of the way through, I switched computers and accidentally forgot which document I was working in. I made the last 20% of the changes to the original document, not the copy. Then, to add fun, I went back and made some changes throughout the original document (adding chapter headings). When I realized I had spread my changes between the two AND, because of everything I'd done afterwards, I couldn't just copy and paste the whole thing, I was so pissed. I had to paste the corrections together in chunks, AND IN THE COURSE OF PASTING THE STORY IN CHUNKS I accidentally deleted about a full Word page from a climactic scene. I hadn't realized it until I was listening back and it sounded wrong. I thought it was just a recording blip, where she'd accidentally skipped a section, but nope. It was my fault.

I'm splicing them in now. I'll tell you what, sitting here listening through a 5.5 hour recording making tiny adjustments along the way is exactly the kind of tedium I was born for.

 

[RoperTrace]

Bit of a cheeky title, maybe. I wrote a story last summer and posted it right about this time, for the 2024 Summer Lovin’ event. It did pretty well, and I moved on to other stories. I wrote a story for Omen’s 2025 Pink Orchid, and then I wrote a wildly fun Dwarves in Space piece that was super, super satisfying. I’ve got about 15k words written in my next project, but progress has been slow.

I don’t usually get stuck on stories after I post them. Like most of us, I obsess about them when they’re new and getting attention. I refresh often to check for comments, and then after a day or two (sometimes longer, especially for events), the views slow down. The comments slow down. The wheel turns.

And yet, a year later, I’m still thinking about that summer story. Out. I think it’s the best, most complete story I’ve ever written. I have a series that’s about twice the length that eclipses it in most respects, but in terms of bang for your buck I think Out is maybe as good as I’m capable of. At the time I was working on it, I was paying for Speechify. It was a useful editing tool, but little by little I became obsessed with having Out read to me. I was still listening to it long after that refreshing period was over. I even started making small edits to get it to read it better. There was one part where Speechify parsed “the vice principal’s voice over the PA” as “The vice prince of Pennsylvania.” There were other gaffs, but that one was the funniest, and I could never quite get it all perfect.

It took me a while to realize that I was misusing an AI tool. I kept justifying it to myself in my head, that it was hurting no one. Sometime around the beginning of 2025, I stopped using it… but I didn’t stop thinking about Out. I thought about the characters, and I read it over and over, and what I eventually realized is that I want an audiobook version of it. I want the thing that I had, but real. I should pay an artist.

I sat on this idea for a long time. I looked into getting one of my shorter stories recorded years ago (2015?), and had a rough idea how it worked. You pay an hourly amount per hour of finished content. In the course of being an unpaid sex worker, I’ve made some friends in different fields, and I reached out to a few of them. One of them sent me this link (https://voiceactingclub.com/rates/#pfh). Based on that, I was looking in the low-to-mid tier. I don't need foley or music, or anything more complicated than a read-through of a document.

I asked my friends, but they were all busy or unwilling to commit to an audiobook. Out is 53k words. When I was having Speechify read it for me, it was five and a half hours long. Some of them take VA commissions, but only for shorter pieces or only to read the dialog for a specific character. At $200 an hour, I was looking at somewhere over $1000. Fine. Having exhausted my personal contacts, I went to a few different VAs I was a fan of through Youtube and asked them. One got back to me quickly and said they don’t do audiobooks. The other two didn’t respond at all.

The friend who gave me that link above then shared this site (castingcall.club) with me. Spoiler alert: I got 30 auditions within 48 hours once I posted the job. Now, it took a little while to muddle through the options and I wasn’t at all sure that I’d filled out every field properly. CastingCall gave me the option to put 3 lines of story into a posting, and all those auditioning had the ability to read those lines, make a recording, and submit the recording. Some of them were AI, and I dismissed those out of turn. Some were male VAs even though I specified that I was looking for Young Adult/Adult Female. I thanked them and dismissed their entries.

That left about 20 serious auditions. Half of those weren’t what I was looking for in terms of vocal pitch. Of the 10 remaining, 5 were good but had a thicker accent that wasn’t what I was looking for. The other 4 were wonderful, read the lines nice and clearly, had the right pitch and tone, and were great.

One of them, though, understood the lines a little differently and put some zazz on parts that, in the original story, I had formatted with italics for emphasis. There was no link to my Lit posting of the story, so I don’t think they did research in order to nail it. Either way, I knew which one I was going to go with as soon as I heard her. It just took me a while to let go of some of the other applicants because they were so good.

I had originally put the posting up for a 2 week period, not really knowing how it would all go, but since I had my dream choice so early in the process I “closed the auditions” and “assigned the role”, all of which is pretty straight forward through the website. Once that happens, unless there are auditions that are still working their way through the system (I got one last one right afterwards, but it didn’t change my mind), the site stops taking applicants for the role.

I messaged the VA I’d chosen through the site once, and then we followed up on discord. It was nice to share a preferred platform. I was excited, she was excited. She had questions, and I filled her in on the story. Everyone is 18+. There are 5-ish sex scenes. The story is about this, this, and that. It has themes of this, this, and that. I currently have no plans to sell the recording she ultimately gives me, so it’ll just be for private use. We confirmed that Paypal was a shared platform for paying her.

I was very excited. She was very excited.

I asked her to read a little bit of it, to see if it was her kind of thing, although I was very clear that it wasn’t necessary. If I’m paying per hour of finished recording, then she’s not getting paid to read my work for pleasure. She was happy to read some, though, and it was good that she did because afterwards she had some questions about how I wanted different things handled. “Should I add laughter when the story narrates a character laughing?” “You’ve got a part here where several characters are talking at once. Do you want me to record all of those and layer them or read it just like you’ve got it in the narration?” Etc.

We went through it a little more. I specified that, between the two main characters, I was hoping she could voice one of them slightly lower and one of them slightly higher. She asked if I wanted to do any live voice coaching, giving pointers on anything, but I declined. I’m happy to leave choices in her hand and be grateful for what I get, though I got the impression she was perfectly open to coaching and suggestions. I'm too much of a hermit to even consider it, really, but also I really do trust her instincts.

I gave her the option to turn the work in in pieces, getting paid in parts, but she was fine with doing the whole thing at once and getting paid all at once.

This is currently where the project stands. She gave me a rough schedule, and should be (at this minute), doing some it. I don’t know if she’ll finish recording today, and I don’t know how long of a process it will be for her to edit it into a finished, singular file.

Happy to answer any questions if anyone has follow ups.

(@ShelbyDawn57 @UsuallyPresent @iwatchus )

I'm more than a little impressed with your level of thoroughness, and preparation in this selection process.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I'm more than a little impressed with your level of thoroughness, and preparation in this selection process.

I've been thinking about this for a very long time so I had some knowledge going in, but an absolutely massive part of this was the castingcall.club website. It's so useful and so handy. I'm retelling what I did, but the way that site is set up and the large pool of talent that's there, looking for and advertising work, makes me look a lot more buttoned up than I felt.

If I look good it's because that site was such a huge help for me, so much so that I felt compelled to share the process for ya'll. You don't need to have all the t's crossed or the i's dotted. You can figure it out along the way like I did, find someone who will work with your budget, and get something real in your hands.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Done now. I did most of it in two five-hour chunks, yesterday and today. I spliced in all the corrections, and after everything I removed approximately 6 minutes of total runtime (even including the 2+ minute section I added in, as mentioned above).

There are some mistakes. The VA pronounced emphatic as empathic in most places, and might be young enough that she's never heard of the auto manufacturer Plymouth. She pronounced it Ply Mouth. I have no plans to get these corrected, as they represent insignificant blips in what is otherwise a toweringly good performance. I'm ridiculously pleased.

The editing presented some problems. The original .wav file was 3 gb in size, but Audacity wanted to work out of a proprietary project file. In the course of making my edits, that file size ballooned to 7 gb. All of a sudden, between one correction and the next, it slowed, then was sluggish, and then crashed. And then crashed again.

Fortunately, Audacity was able to recover itself, even though it struggled. I exported the project into .wav format again, reducing it back to 3.31 gb, and started a new project. This reset the problem enough that I was able to push through to the end with no more hiccups. Even though Audacity was taking snapshots in the background, I followed @Erozetta 's advice and saved often, using differentiated file names. I bet I have 60 gb of save files just for this one recording, and I'll have to track them all down at some point to clean up.

Now I have a complete, edited .ogg file, and I'll be listening to that over and over trying to see if there's anything else I want to change before I start moving on to the next phase.

Potential update in about a week?

 

[Euphony]

I bet I have 60 gb of save files just for this one recording, and I'll have to track them all down at some point to clean up.

Speaking my language.

I'll mention a tool that helped me get my digital ducks in a row, WizTree.

It's a visual file explorer that helps you see clusters of files cluttering up your space.



There are advanced file search tools within if they'd help.

And if you need even more granular, WizFile likely will take up the slack (but I'd be dumbstruck if Tree didn't get the task done in most instances.)

I just tell Tree to give me an overview of the messes I've made and it helps me save me from myself.