audio downloads

Hello everybody,
I’m hoping, fingers crossed, to have the audio recordings downloads that I made of both Singing Songs and Gemma to be available for purchase in the next week or so.  I had thought, “Oh well, down-loadable audio books, how difficult can that be?  Go to a good sound studio.  You’re used to that from the movie days.  Work with a good engineer/producer/mixing genius (aka Richard Dolmat of Digital Sound Magic)  read the book into a mic.  Redo what you don’t like.  Richard cuts and mixes it Simple.“ 

Not quite.  I started with Gemma.  OH MY GOD!  It’s one thing to write this book, that was scary and traumatic enough, but to read the whole thing out loud!  And of course for me, (as anyone who’s been to one of my book reading knows,) it’s impossible for me to just read things plain.  It’s like when I start giving actual voice to the words I’ve written, the saying it out loud makes it more real in a way and it grabs me by the throat and sucks me into the situation.  And the whole “Gemma” situation is not one that is a picnic in the park.  There were days when I’d come home from the recording studio and it would be a good hour before the shaking would stop.  Not to mention, I must have doubled my grey hair count,  (If I was counting, which I’m not.  My grey has gone way past the counting stage!) recording these books.  But I hope, hope, hope that for all of you people out there who came to my readings and kept pestering me to make an audio recordings of my books, that these recording will be everything you wished for.  As it was quite traumatic and emotional recording both of these books and I would hate to think I did it for naught.  I recorded Gemma first because I thought it would be the hardest one to do emotionally, and it was.  But then when I recorded Singing Songs, it was a different kind of emotional roller coaster.  I was expecting it to be a much gentler read, and in a way it was, but in another way, it tore me up even bigger than Gemma, because it was my first time reading anything from Singing Songs out loud since I admitted to the truth about it.  And having that knowledge there, out of the closet, made reading the things and experiences I remembered as a child out loud, saying the words, remembering the incidences…  Well, let me just say this, I felt a lot more vulnerable and shaky than I expected. 

Anyway, you will be able to download the books either by chapter, so you don’t have to download and listen to the whole book at one time.  But we’ll also offer the option on downloading the whole thing at once for those of you who prefer that.  Once you download the book you’ll be able to listen to it either on your computer, or on your iPod.  (I say this so knowledgeably, like I’ve ever done either, but I’ve been assured that the people who do this kind of thing will know what I’m talking about!)

Posted by Meg Tilly on Thursday, September 27, 2007 in Chewing the Fat