It’s been a busy month for me work-wise, for which I am grateful.  Holiday advertising is in full swing, which means voiceovers — for which I am also grateful.  And I just finished narrating one book and am starting into another* — again, grateful!

But I was sure looking forward to a day off at Thanksgiving.  We’d be convening at my sister’s house in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range.  It would be a complete change of scenery and pace, and I promised myself that I would not talk, not even THINK, about work for the whole darned day.

And that’s what happened.  For awhile.  A wonderful dinner, the pleasure of beloved family around me, the smell of the woodstove, the sound of rain misting down outside.  A special treat this year was one of the guests, Wagner Soares, a professional bassist and music student from Brazil.  He was part of a recent CD project for which my sister wrote some lyrics, and he is a gem of a human being: sensitive, talented, intelligent.

Before pie, we all suited up in rain gear and headed out on our traditional Thanksgiving Day hike.  A mile or so into the forest, most of the group turned around, but I wasn’t done hiking — I’d been waiting for this for weeks! — so Wagner and I continued on alone.   We chatted a little about general things, then about our respective work, and then Wagner asked:  ”So what mics do you have?”

And it was all over.

We talked and talked: about mics and mixers, about Pro Tools and Logic and Apogee and frequency response and the pencil tool and getting your groove back when you have to stop for punch-ins.   We discovered that we both have a tendency to enjoy the solitude of our work too much, so we’re both strict about getting out for daily walks.  I told Wagner I’d once had to struggle through some Portuguese names in an audiobook, and he taught me basic pronunciation.  Wagner tried to describe how he misses and doesn’t miss Brazil, and I taught him the English proverb “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Suddenly we looked around: it was almost dusk, and we were at the intersection of two logging roads I’d never seen before, with miles of forest around us.

“Should we take the right-hand fork?” Wagner asked.  ”It looks like it might eventually loop back to the road.”

This, of course, would have been extremely unwise.  You don’t want to follow an unknown route in the coast mountains, out of cell phone range, at dusk, in the rain.  It wouldn’t have been a dire situation, but it could have gotten miserable pretty fast.  We were also dressed in deer colors, and I didn’t have my trusty cougar alarm.

And yet, I considered it.   I mean, we were just starting on the topic of Blue mics for the iPad!

But I dragged my attention back to our surroundings and told Wagner we needed to retrace our route.  After all, I said, we’d still have the several miles back to tie up all our conversational threads.  By the time we made it back to the house, we were wet, hungry, blessedly talked-out, and thoroughly enjoying our new friendship.

So yes, I did talk about work on my day off.  A whole lot.

And for that, I am grateful.

————-

*What books, you ask?  Okay, okay; twist my arm:

I just finished Martha Beck’s newest book, for HighBridge Audio:

And I’m starting for Blackstone Audio I’d Rather Be in Charge, a great motivational title for women in business by former Undersecretary of State Charlotte Beers.

Heather's Playhouse.

One of the most enjoyable voiceovers I ever did was an online calculus course for Cengage Learning.  I spent maybe 60 hours recording things like:

At the time I was doing this job, my father was very ill, and my siblings and I were sharing the care of him.  I’d go into each session and concentrate on making sure that Y = 2 ÷ (5 + z) didn’t sound like Y = (2 ÷ 5) + z . . . and for awhile, my worry and stress were forgotten.

A recording booth is many things to me.  It’s where I earn a living, of course, but it’s more than just the gig.  It’s a place of intense concentration and creativity, a place where I work hard and love what I’m doing.  It energizes and centers me, and the hours fly.

(What’s not to love when you get to do ads like this?)  

When I’m in my home studio, especially, I lose all sense of time, because I can’t hear the noises that anchor me to the rhythms of an ordinary day.  Garbage trucks will come and go; the UPS guy might tromp the front steps; my husband will come home from work, fix dinner, and watch the game . . . and I’m oblivious.  (Well, except for the rugby World Cup — I’m watching those games right alongside him!  But I digress.)

I glance at the clock on my monitor and it’s 3 PM; I glance again, and it’s 8.

My booth is so insulated, in fact, that if someone knocks on the door I usually jump out of my shoes.   I now ask friends and family to text instead (e.g., “I’m standing outside your door”) — it still startles me, but less!

So to all my lovely clients who appreciate that I make money and/or art for them: let me assure you that the pleasure is mutual.  And to my husband, who built me my rockin’ home studio: I promise I’ll finish in time tonight to fix you dinner and catch the the NZ-Australia semifinal.

How about you, dear readers?  Where is your time machine — what makes the hours fly?

A case in point is how I came to voice this ad:

I was driving from Oregon to Canada on a mini-vacation with my husband.  I’d purposely left my laptop and recording gear at home –which basically guaranteed that Murphy’s Law would kick in and I’d get great auditions and job offers as soon as we hit I-5.

Sure enough, somewhere around Nowhere, Washington, I got a text from Paul Machu, a producer and longtime client, asking if I could send him a sample read for a TV ad. It was a rush request, and if I got the gig I’d be voicing the whole ad campaign.  No way was I passing on this.

But where could I record an audition in the next 6 hours?  I racked my little brain. Suddenly a memory surfaced of a Linkedin discussion from months back in the Working Voice Actors group (tirelessly managed by Ed Victor). . . a producer named Alex someone from Canada — Vancouver? Victoria? . . . the studio name was a sailing term . . . Spinnaker Sound!  That was it!

I grabbed the iPhone and Googled Spinnaker Sound . . . Lo and behold, it was just across the border, 30 minutes away.  I called them and reached Creative Director Alex Whittaker.  Yes, he remembered me from that Linkedin discussion, and yes, he’d be happy to squeeze me in for a quick session.  A half-hour later, I was in their booth whipping out three takes, and a half-hour after that we were back on the road.

Yes, I got the gig.  But even if I hadn’t been a Stunning Success and Enhanced U.S.-Canada Relations, the whole episode would have been worthwhile purely to be able to connect with Spinnaker Sound and get to know Alex Whittaker and his studio partner, Rice Honeywell.    Rice, by the way, is hilarious — a savvy marketer and an absolute genius with accents.  Perhaps he was responsible for the clapboard concept on their website?

Rice

Alex

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to tweet this blog and post it on Facebook and Google+ . . . oh, yeah, and Linkedin.

This series was my first exposure to the Amish sub-genre of the Christian sub-genre of the Romance genre, and I really didn’t know what to expect. Chase scenes in buggies? Chaste scenes in cornfields? Or something grittier, maybe, fulfilling the popular epithet of “bonnet-ripper”?

What I found was: yes, yes, and, well, sort of.

Climaxes (dramatic and romantic, never sexual) often do take place in buggies — as, I suppose, they do in real Amish life.  (I mean, where else can you get your rival alone, have a heart-to-heart with your mother, or propose in private to your sweetheart?)  There are flower-filled meadows, berry-filled woods, bucolic farmhouses redolent with the smell of fresh bread.  There are also tender love stories and trials of faith.

What surprised me about Gray’s romances, though, was that smack in the midst of these idylls are quiet sub-plots about cancer, domestic abuse, and bullying. Gray gives these elements a very light touch, but they’re there.

As a reader (yes, we do read books before we narrate them!) I liked this dimension.  And as a narrator, I enjoyed the challenge of finding a dramatic interpretation that preserved the gentle sweetness of the story but didn’t oversimplify it.

I’ll let the author herself explain it more — an exclusive interview of Shelley Shepard Gray by Grover Gardner appeared this week on Blackstone Audio’s blog:

My DH (who built it evenings over the course of a year) tried to DIY most of it, but we did splurge on Auralex and haven’t regretted it — it is so dead, and I mean that in the best way –  perfect for audiobooks, especially.   I go in there and don’t emerge for hours, which is why we call it Heather’s Playhouse:

So a big thanks to my client Attic Media for writing and filming so well.  Take a look at this web video and how they make city buses look glamorous . . .

I still remember being captivated by the book’s contraction-less dialogue. It created a sort of prosaic ambience of the Old West.  In the real Old West, evidently they did use contractions more often, but Portis’s diction recreated a virtual, unique — and successful — authenticity.

Interestingly, in the 1969 movie, John Wayne and Kim Darby handled the no-contraction dialogue most comfortably, while Glen Campbell (who otherwise was dorkily perfect for his role) sounded a little more awkward — and in the current movie, their counterparts, Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld, also naturalize their lines a little better than Matt Damon. But don’t get me wrong — Damon does an exceptional job in this role, maybe the best performance I’ve ever seen from him, and that’s saying something. He gives a nuanced, emotionally committed depth to his Texas Ranger that is at times very moving. The scene in which he bids “a-dee-ose” to a tearful Hailee when he gives up the chase is unforgettable.

The inimitable Coen brothers do their usual directing magic in this film, coaxing remarkable performances out of even the most minor actors. But the story line in the original film ran more naturally.  The Coens’ plot sequence seems almost like an abridgement.

I want to confirm that feeling by revisiting the 1969 film, but not surprisingly, in my Netflix queue it says “Very Long Wait.” In the meantime, I might watch A Serious Man again — one of my favorite Coen brothers films ever.

But I learned some encouraging things about the whole resolution thing when I read the book Succeed by Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson. And by “read,” I mean “aloud,” as in: I narrated it for Blackstone Audio last month. (This is why I love narrating nonfiction: I learn such interesting things! Sometimes I even retain what I learn, but that’s a subject for a future blog.)

Halvorson, who’s a social psychologist specializing in motivation and goals, tells us that the government actually keeps track of New Year’s resolutions. I checked out the website she cited, and sure enough, there are the usual suspects in the Top Ten list (stop smoking, lose weight, etc.), with resource links for government pamphlets on how to drag your sorry butt toward achieving them. Halvorson notes that the failure rates for many of these resolutions are stunning (e.g., 85% of smokers fail to quit).

But here’s the encouraging part, and it has to do with radishes. In one study of self-control, hungry college students were presented with two bowls each, of chocolates and raw radishes, and asked (depending on the group) to eat no chocolates and a few radishes or vice-versa. The researchers then asked the students to work on a very difficult puzzle. They found that the group that had been made to eat radishes and avoid chocolate had the least patience and self-control with this new task.

It turns out that self-control is a kind of “muscle.” If you overuse it, you can fatigue it (as the radish-eaters did, which is why they couldn’t stick with the puzzle). But if you do a little every day to pump it up, it gets stronger: for instance, in another study, people who used their non-dominant hands for some tasks every day showed more self-control in general afterwards.

Halvorson’s advice for resolutions (New Year’s and otherwise) include:
• Don’t overload yourself with “willpower” demands, or you’ll fatigue your self-control muscle
• Use incentives (non-food rewards for eating less; money for smoking less)
• Practice a small daily self-control task unrelated to your main goal, and you’ll do better with all your goals

I recommend Halvorson’s fascinating book, and not just because I recorded it. Honestly, read it in print if you want; whatever. But if you opt not to read / listen to the book, you can always go the slacker’s route, as I do: don’t make New Year’s resolutions to begin with! Less failure that way! It defies many wise proverbs and parables, I know, but it sure cleans the slate after the holiday binge.