Musings of Two Creative Minds

"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” (Scottish poet Robert Burns (from his poem "To a Mouse" 1785) As most of you, if not all, are aware that I've been trying to bring to life the "Library of the Obscure" (LOTO for short here), over on YouTube. The idea behind the library has long been to introduce listeners to a whole range of authors and short stories from decades or even a hundred years or more ago. Now some of you might be asking yourselves, why? What's so fascinating about tales that were written so long ago, when we've got authors galore coming out with stories and books these days? Well, the answer is actually quite simple. You ask just about any well-known author what prompted them to write in their most well-known genres, and most will tell you they were inspired by pieces written by other authors. Take Stephen King, he'll tell you about some of his favorite authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and others whose...

I haven't posted much about writing lately, but this is not because I haven't been writing. On the contrary, I've been rather busy with stories lately. In fact, I recently completed one tale set during in World War I, involving our vampyre "Nathan" (from The Vampyre Blogs part of the Para-Earths Series) and a zeppelin. Sounds intriguing? Well, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until the 2nd anthology "Two for the Road" to come out, to read it.  Which with a little luck, and some actual work on my part, may actually happen later this year. We'll see... HAHAHAHA (I crack myself up some days). But seriously, I would like to see it happen, but if I've learned anything in the last few months is that "Life gets in the way...", so we'll see. Mind you I will try to keep you all in the loop as best I can. And speaking of stories, I've also been working on a second lengthy tale which will also appear in that same collection. This o...

This little video gives you an idea of why I get so busy with my audio recordings. I swear, when you're doing most of your work at home, this means you literally are the chief, cook, and bottlewasher. From start to finish, you are your own director, actor, voice talent, editor... the works! It's all on you to make that audio ready to be submitted to ACX and then onto Audible. And there will be days when you are so confident that the recording you just did was F------ Awesome! Possibly one of the best takes you've ever done in your entire career and then... Well, just watch the video below... And even after doing this for 3 years, this still happens all too often to me. And yet, in spite of all the times this happens, I'm still beginning work on my own podcast. Stay tuned for more on that. My goal right now is to get at least a dozen or more installments recorded BEFORE I start to actually get the podcast up and running. Like my unabridged reading of Charles...

Until recently, I've always done all my audio recording at my home studio. But I needed some professional demo recordings which brought me to Reeds Recording and the awesome Adam who was the recording technician that day. Now, what brought all this about?  Well even though I've already recorded 4 audiobooks on Audible, I have never done voice work for commercials or documentaries and such. And for those, I needed to learn some new skills and techniques, as well as a better understanding of what the industry is looking for in voice over talents. So I got myself some professional voice over training through "Such A Voice", who paired me up my coaches Ed Renninger, Justine Reiss, my director Nancy Wilson, and my tech advisor Ben Marney. These people made a such a difference in how I do voice work now, and I cannot thank them all enough. Where do I go from here? Well, one step at a time. First I'm going to be putting up a web page and loading my demos, as well as some...

  Hello again everyone. I recently had a request to the links regarding to all my posts here about doing audio recordings. As I started to gather the links, I quickly realized that they were all seriously scattered throughout the blog, as I'd done them over the course of 13 months. Plus, there were a number of other entries in between which made them even more difficult to find.  So today's entry mainly consists of all the links for easy access to anyone who wishes to look over the details and suggestions I had about audio recordings. So far there are only eight entries, but I am planning on more in the coming months.        ADVENTURES IN AUDIO RECORDING LINKS: Part I: https://musingsof2creativeminds.com/2019/07/27/adventures-in-audio-recording/ Part II: https://musingsof2creativeminds.com/2019/08/09/adventures-in-audio-recording-part-ii/ Part III: https://musingsof2creativeminds.com/2019/08/25/adventures-in-audio-recording-part-iii/ Part IV: http...