I wrote the author, Gene Luke, just the other day to let him know that I started the project, and that I almost forgot how much I enjoyed his writing style. It’s very simple and straightforward, but evocative at the same time. He doesn’t use ten words when six will do. It reminds me of Tolkien, though with more narrative flow and a more pleasant prose.

I mentioned before that Gene was one of the first authors to trust me with his words when I started voice acting when he hired me to narrate and produce The Artisan, a historical fiction about Serbian POWs during WWII. It was a very moving piece. At one point, I had to stop recording for the night because it just moved me to tears and I couldn’t get myself together to keep going.

That’s an absolute gift to give an actor, to write words so moving that there’s no heavy lifting on my end to get the emotion from the page into my voice.

This book (so far) is much more fun; he’s called it a Balkan take on Don Quixote. Having never read Cervantes, I can’t say if that’s true…I’ll need to ask my wife. She read Quixote in its original Castellan Spanish.

At any rate, I’m just about 25% into recording the book. I’m finding that now, between being able to record punch-and-roll and using Pozotron for QA that my workflow has become to record large sections of the material, then QA that chunk all at once, record pickups, and spend an afternoon editing. I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak and change this moving forward, though ultimately the goal is still to get to a point where I don’t need to do any editing or QA and I can focus on recording.

I’d be a bit further along with recording today, but I woke up with a stubborn headache that took me a while to shake enough where I could record. I’m also finishing up house projects so that we can host an end-of-summer/beginning-of-the-school-year barbecue for a few of the other teachers my wife works with. (Don’t worry, proper social distancing will take place.)