It is Just Work
One of my annoying phrases from the other side of my life. Not meant as dismissive or belittling, but a means of recognizing that sometimes the only way through is through. “It is Just Work” means that with steady work, steady effort, the to-do list shortens and the done-list lengthens.
Writing is work. The work of writing seems to involve little writing. Irony?
Tired of hearing mistakes in my own audiobook recordings, I needed help. I tried a few folks on service boards with little joy. In November and December, I started shopping for a professional post production audio engineer or firm offering such services. Eventually, I landed with a firm in Sweden who has been amazing. Sure wish I could say their name. Their website proudly states “We Are Ljudbyran”, which means “Sound Agency” in Swedish.
https://www.ljudbyran.se/#about
Yes, in the modern day, the work of writing includes audio work. Write, edit, record, edit, edit, market, record, write, edit, market.
I’ve listened to audiobook all of my life starting with E.B. White reading Charlotte’s Web on a multi-platter album set. After the audio for The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County got published, I listened. I heard speak-os and audio problems. I crawled deep into my skin with shame. I found Ljudbyran.
During the first session, we chased digital gremlins from my recording setup. And I got a bit of coaching. After the recoding of 2 short stories, we chased down the last gremlin hiding in my system. I use a Rodecaster Pro as my audio recorder. It does some cool stuff to reach out and find sounds it thinks it cares about. It [can] automatically increase mic gain to find those sounds. And it [can] do some audio gating and post processing. With all of the internal helping tech turned off, we found ourselves working with raw audio that precisely matched what I said. What went in came also came out. The audio version of WYSIWYG.
I had already recorded 13 chapters of Stolen Mountain (pub date: September 2025). And recorded about 8 short stories with one released when I decided that it was time to start over. I embraced the cost of a professional audio engineer comparing that with the cringy and red feeling of listening to mistakes on Libro.fm and/or Audible.
The work of January went like this:
- Read story into mic.
- Listen to my dyslexic self read from the page to the tape
- Hear my creative reading at play. Highlight in yellow my boo-boos.
- Go to the recording booth. Re-recording the sentences in yellow.
- Return to desk, edit the fixes in
- Digitally hand the work to Lora in Belize, my fearless editor. She listens to my droning voice.
- She highlights more of my boo-boos.
- I fix and splice into the tape (digitally of course)
- Hand the work to Daniel at Ljudbyran in Gothenburg
- And it comes back perfect! Including the intro and outros sounding great over a lovely recording of Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides.
- Then I select the first two minutes as the sample
- Pack it all off to the publisher for them to do their magic.
As soon as I had a break from short stories, I started reading the chapters of Stolen Mountain.
Boy do I make mistakes. I make them on the page when writing. Lora finds most. Then when reading, I find phrasing that trips my tongue or is accidently ambiguous. I make mistakes reading. I make mistakes speaking. But it is just work. It is all work. Steady work.