Release the Mortimer!

Happy dance done - check.

Celebratory slice of chocolate fudge cake eaten - check.

Online scramble to post release notes to my billions of social media followers - check.

Okay, it seems that Mortimer has officially been released! 

http://bigworldnetwork.com/site/series/theshieldingofmortimertownes/

The first handful of episodes have been recorded and are waiting their turn for the weekly posting on the BWN site which leads me to an idea. Maybe now is a good time to offer a little insight into the process. What exactly happens behind the scenes to release a book? Of course, I can only answer that from the authors perspective. My editors would probably tell the story a bit differently, but on my side of thing it starts with an email from my editor. After she has chopped the book into twelve episodes she sends me one episode at a time. There are two documents; one has all the changes highlighted with the editor's comments in the margin. The other is called a 'clean' copy. If I like all of the changes and don't make any more myself then I use the clean copy as a script. From there I sit down in my little studio and record the voice tracks.

It took a while to develop my technique for the voice tracks, and by technique  don’t mean my questionable narrative talent. I'm referring to the sound engineering part. I have separate tracks for the intro music, intro voice and episode number. You may notice that the introduction voice sounds a bit different than the normal reading voice (the narrative). That's because it has an effect on it called 'doubling'. Then I get to reading. Sometimes I can only get through a sentence at a time because I choke, my dog Tufty starts barking out in the yard, a tractor drives by, someone knocks on the door asking directions or a random question which usually gets interrupted by, "Hey, are you American?" or whatever. Anyway, the first thing I do when I get back into the studio is to go back and listen to where the break happened. Then I delete the bad part at a place where it's easy to pick up again. I jump to the second track so I don't record over the tail end of the other one and start again. This goes back and forth until the whole episode is done.

The last part is the mastering where I add the BWN tag (that's the "You're listening to Big World Network" snippet) and a cocktail of audio effects that make the whole thing ready for broadcasting. I'd be happy to share that list and the settings with you, just send me an email. The very last thing I do is email the audio file to my editor which takes awhile. It’s a big file and we don't have superfast broadband here in the Irish countryside. Come to think of it we don't have superfast anything here unless you count Tufty doing laps around his little track out in the yard...which reminds me, it's a Formula 1 race weekend in Barcelona. Sweet!