You can, of course, take a look at the remaining data here.
One may suppose others are more rational than me. Others would have made an ACX account first, but not me. I fought an uphill battle of fire trucks, police and ambulance sirens, preschool hours with screaming children, elementary school bells, constant air flight traffic of all kinds (although, one supposes it is worth noting in reference to “all kinds”, I didn’t actually see anything I couldn’t identify; in fairness, I didn’t always check what was going on through the window), local neighborhood traffic, dogs barking, a cat meowing, a freeway, one public railway, some less-public railways, a whining refrigerator and a laptop that wanted to overheat by the end of every recording session. Oh, and a ton of stammering and starting sentences over to make sure I got the lines said as close to the way I wanted them as possible. And that was just recording.
Then, I fought multiple DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation) to get what I wanted from a production standpoint, probably more due to my own unfamiliarity with them than anything else. I later enlisted the help of my brother, who also used at least 2 other DAWs, at which time we had to scrap our initial work for the initial chapters and start over. (Oh, and this was after a separate recording for the entirety of “The Dreary House” part of Branching Chaos as “The Dreary House”, the slightly different novella published before appearing as it does in Branching Chaos, and scrapping that in favor of recording the work as a whole.)
I had no idea audiobooks were this hard, and I will do my part to keep reading print and digital, because this is way too much work for one person. That, or I’ll hire someone else next time, because I’m not dealing with this again. Not yet, anyway. I’m much happier writing books, saying or singing words, and making music. Audiobooks are, decidedly, “not that,” and, to those who prefer audiobooks, I’m so happy you waited for me to get all of this as a final product. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m just now having ACX check everything as I write about these experiences, and there are 3-4 chapters with issues, chapter 6 is stuck on analysis like chapter 1 was for a while, so we’ll see if it, too, gives an error. But those errors should be easily fixable by me or my brother this week. By the time anyone reads this, the mental landscape of recording of this audiobook will be looked back on by me like something out of Eraserhead: Gray scale, distant, and a time bordering on hostile that, while terrifying, does at least seem to be over with until I make a screenplay.
As for the cover being “off”, I wanted readers to look closer at the cover of duality depicted, because a theme of duality permeates this book in the way everyone chooses their own reality. I also wanted the letters to connect and be framed by the branches in some way, and, offsetting it, I felt, emphasized the chaos.
To get into it just a little further, the final publication of Branching Chaos didn’t go well, either. I once again did whatever I wanted without reading the instructions, and this resulted in a rather difficult-to-read book from a “there are words, with exact spaces for those words, missing” standpoint. It has been reworked for a better “all the words are there” experience to coincide with the release of this audiobook. I would like to think the “without reading the instructions” part of these experiences has been worked out, and I’m excited about future projects.
It’s pretty cool how it took the published, well-known authors about 2 years to publish an audiobook back when I was younger. And, despite all the aforementioned frustrations, it took me, as an independent author, a month and a week and maybe a few days shy of 2 years to do the same, almost completely by myself.
[Thanks, bro.]