Hello everyone. It has been an interesting couple of months, I have been rather busy while in lockdown. Somewhere between suffering a complete mental breakdown and sleeping, I have been preparing my audiobook, a process I naively thought would not take so long, a week or so at most. In fact, it involved me sitting at my desk for an ungodly amount of time, since the end of March I’ve been at my desk every day, surviving off tea, homemade vegetable soups, fruit wafers and blueberries. I thought I’d share some of the craziness before I get back on track with Episode Two, I also plan on going out today, to catch some sun, it’s a beautiful day here in Oxfordshire, there are a number of parks nearby which I’d like to explore, I feel like I’ve hit a milestone, it won’t be long now before my day job picks up again, I hope everyone is well, so let’s get to it.
Preparation
In preparation for the audiobook, I’ve had to swallow a few bitter pills, the first one was realising that I could not afford to hire a professional studio equipped with masterful sound tech, I simply do not have the income to support the hire. The second pill was after I researched voice actors, preferably I’d like a man to read Lethaniel’s segments and a woman to read Isabelle’s. If I had to choose between one of the two genders to read the book, I’d prefer a female. I’m not entirely sure why I’d pick female over male, I’ve listened to a few audiobooks and watched a few in session performed by men and they do an astounding job, but because I feel Episode One-The Utopian Dream belongs to Isabelle, as talked about in my last article, The Character Study, a woman reading to my mind is preferable in this case. The Ancestral Odyssey does have an air of femininity about it and it will explode when I publish Episode Two-Rise of The Black Doves which is heavily female oriented, with a main cast of seven Star Callers who are all of course women. This has always been the case, ever since I started formulating ideas back in 2003 to present day, I wanted to give my female characters and villains a presence. This does not mean there are not great male characters, I can list of a bunch I love, one of which is Ridian Messiah, but TAO’s centre piece is female centric, and I like that. Unfortunately, in conjunction with the size and the time I’d need the pair of actors or perhaps just the one vocalist if I decided to go down that route, I simply lacked the funds to accomplish this feat. To get around these problems I had to get creative, so I decided to do it myself. Over the last six months I’ve been talking to people who know more about this stuff than I do, musicians mainly who advised me in what equipment I should look into purchasing, advice I’ve bookmarked and am saving for. I cannot afford the best of the best but I do not want to do this dirt cheap either, I’ve rent that needs paying, a fridge that needs replenishing and bills to pay, so finding that sweet, reasonable middle ground has been a battle in that of itself. I live next to a busy road so I need to board up my windows with hundreds of egg cartons glued to cardboard, I need to buy thick curtain and along with my blinds, that should be enough to muffle the sound of passing cars. I’ve bought a screen, a moving blanket that will go over my hard surfaces and have accumulated a couple of dozen foam boards. I’ve been taking reading lessons (don’t laugh) there is a difference between reading and reading, one sounds like reading a textbook the other is storytelling, there is a huge difference. With all of this combined with a SubZero BASE-2 Microphone, I am confident I am giving this the best chance of success, but the success of this audiobook depends more on the equipment, my home studio and my voice, there was something else going on which NEEDED sorting out, something which has been bugging me for two years.
The Soft Edit
Even though I realised that I could not complete this audiobook in the fashion that I wanted, part of this whole experience, not just with what has happened recently in the last couple of months, but since day one, is coming to terms with the fact that you will face obstacles, whether it be with funding, skill, location, particular circumstances, heartbreak or health, we all face trials. These trials test us, these trials separate the men from the boys. Now I am about to say something that a lot people may raise an eyebrow at, and that is – these trials, these hurdles, obstacles whatever you want to call them, are not only hinderances, but they actually are beneficial for the creatives – Before your head explodes, allow me to explain through an example. When I was starting out, before I had even decided to write a book, back when I was amassing sketches and descriptions of my world, I thought and felt that my ideas were top notch, I felt without a shadow of a doubt that this was ace, that this was incredible, that my trilogy (yes, it was a trilogy back then) was the best thing since sliced bread. If I had the resources at seventeen, if I had access to technical crews, writers, graphic artists and so on, I would have finished this project by now, it would be a distant memory by now, the work would have been copied and adapted and everyone would have moved onto other projects. At the time this was all I wanted, to have my vision come to life at such a young age would have been a dream come true, but it would have quickly rotted, and here is why; Ideas evolve, creatives refine their creative process, it never stops. Due to the amount of hurdles I’ve faced, the lack of funding for example (this one has always stifled me), in the time it takes to save for equipment, and to raise the money in order to self-publish, these periods have given me the time to study my work, to find fault with it, to find inconsistencies and plot holes. If you care about your craft, if you are passionate about your words, then you like me will not be able to sleep comfortably before it is straightened out and WILL go to work, you WILL roll up your sleeves and fix it until it is perfect. For all those people out there in my position, young or old, for all those people who are trying to build something and can’t because of said obstacles, I implore you not to give up when things get hard, instead try and look at the obstacle in another way, see it as a problem, an enemy that needs to be taken down. If you cannot afford a piece of equipment, if you are waiting for your Literary Agent or Publishing House to get back in touch or if you work in another field and are hindered, use this time to grow, use this time to reflect, see this time as a gift, a chance to evolve in every way possible, because without this time of growth, your work will not be as strong as it could be, and you will later regret rushing the process instead of employing patience.
Oddly, this reminds me of an old Pokémon episode. I used to watch Pokémon when I was a kid, I was a bit obsessed with it at one point, I even had a fucking Pokedex at one point, my favourite Pokémon was Haunter and then Charizard, I loved that obnoxious lizard. Anyway, I remember a certain episode where our heroes, Ash and Pikachu encounter someone similar, a Pokémon trainer who has a Raichu. A Raichu is a stage two Pikachu. Ash has trouble defeating this trainer at first, how can a lower tier Pikachu defeat an evolved Raichu? It would be like a boxer in training stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson in his prime, it is hardly fair match up. In the end, it is realised that the Raichu was evolved to quickly, it wasn’t granted the time necessary to fine tune itself before evolving, so our Pikachu simply utilises skills the Raichu should have mastered in its earlier stages. It is the same with your craft, before getting in deep, before bringing the big guns to the table and showing the world what you can be, learn how to fine tune yourself, understand that your work is flawed and will be flawed without objectivity and strict discipline. You will fail, you will struggle, none of this is easy, but this is what separates those who make it and those that do not, persistence even when you feel like you’re getting nowhere, to say no to that night out, to say no to binge watch a Netflix series for working on your project. Failure is only failure when you fail to find your feet – Lick your wounds and STAND UP!
I am no stranger to this, you’re probably asking; “What have you done to write such things?” Well I have recently been served up a huge piece of humble pie sprinkled with a coating of humiliation and pain, yes I said pain, because what I’ve gone through since this lockdown started physically hurt and brought about a beating of depression, anxiety and a feeling of defeat. As I was reading through a couple of my chapters in Episode One-The Utopian Dream, in preparation for the audiobook, I spotted a ratty spelling mistake, “No big deal” I thought, I put it out of my mind and carried on until I found another a few paragraphs down, after an hour or so of reading I’d noted a handful of errors that were far worse than simple spelling mistakes, fuck I wish they were just spelling mistakes, spelling errors are easily fixed and readers often skip by them or ignore them, but what I’d found was more than that, I found a couple of plot holes, overly wordy descriptions, vague descriptions, corny dialogue and structural problems. This was when I realised, I had to stop my progression with the audiobook and put down the work I was doing on Episode Two-Rise of The Black Doves and fix the problems at the root. So that is what I did, I bought myself a notebook, found a pen and I went back to page one, line one of The Utopian Dream and began my soft edit.
First, How did this happen? I already had my work edited and second; What is a soft edit?
True, my work was edited almost three years ago now, whether there was an issue in the formatting stages or in my wave of inexperience did I alter or make these errors myself, I am not entirely sure but something happened to mess up the structure, separating dialogue and double spacing scene changes instead of letting them run so close together, all of which I have put right. I’ve also always been told that my work is too wordy, but I never properly understood what people meant when they said this, I figured that if too many words was the only issue it had, then that wasn’t a bad issue considering, but it was within the over use of too many words that more problems would arise; I described the city of Imrondel TWICE for example, and one description was just a bit messy. I went into details when there wasn’t really any need to do so in a lot of cases. I would often use two words to describe something that only needed the one, I’d take up to a paragraph when I only needed a couple of lines. I’d vividly paint a picture and at times this is necessary, but to do it over and over again is just not required. Leaving your readers to fill in the gaps is a skill I feel I have only recently gotten to grips with, allowing your reader to imagine and to colour in the grey is part of the enjoyment, knowing what to detail and what not to is tricky to master, but after this hard lesson, I feel like I’ve finally cracked it…Only took me four years to finally realise…I also found quite a hefty amount of dialogue that just didn’t need to be there, Chapter 20 was a chapter I had to gut and essentially re-do from scratch, there were mistakes a plenty in this chapter and it was tough to get through, the dialogue in parts was awful, clunkily written and pointless, telling the reader how to feel rather than letting them feel it for themselves, it was almost embarrassing, so I had to fix it, and fixed it I most certainly did, transforming it into something more mature, far more flowing and understandable, but more importantly, I gave the reader a chance to feel the emotions themselves, instead of describing how they should feel line by line, and I was only on Chapter 20, there are a total of sixty chapters that needed sifting through and over half a million words. It was painful.
As for the story itself, it did not change; So, for those of you who are reading this who have read Episode One already, do not worry, it has remained the same. I was sure while editing, that each paragraph and each chapter ended on the exact same notes; Sure, in some cases the writing has changed but the end result was the same, only it was arrived at far more professionally, was less clunky, with less error and is now far more flowing and enjoyable. There were some chapters that barely needed touching, most in fact were fine, that only required a few tweaks here and there, a little more emphasis on this that and the other, and it was good to go. Most of it was fine, but there were some parts that needed work, and it was this niggling doubt that put me off from marketing and pitching this product more so, there was always a doubt in my mind that it was not the best it could be, that Ep1-Dream limped in some areas, and I was right, and it wasn’t until after having gone back to beginning, where I found the limp and straightened it out. I made notes along the way, filled an entire notebook, jotting down anything that was worth considering investigating, I filtered through these notes during the re-formatting stages, and highlighted the important ones, the unanswered ones that will be carried over into Ep2. Working in this way has refreshed my memory and ultimately will go toward my credibility as a writer and make for far more strong, competent stories to be released in the future. That was the point of this soft edit, to iron out the errors to the best of my abilities while maintaining the stories integrity, and it is a great story. On surface level it is an epic fantasy, but there is more underneath, a message which I feel is an important one.
I could not have done this without support, as writers we spend an inordinate amount of time alone, we often take criticism to heart and turn into socially awkward assholes who cannot wait to just get away. Far be it from me to give any more lessons, I love what I do, but if you take anything away from this article, understand this; The people around you are important, and it is wise for your mental and physical health to be able to get away from your laptop from time to time, to breath in some fresh air, eat nutritious food and hold conversations with others not cantered around you. As much as I love my work, as much as I want to build it all the time, sometimes escaping the escapism is reward in itself. To hit a milestone, to pull away and have the work out of your mind for a few hours is an incredibly refreshing and re-vitalising feeling and will pave the way for you to create more content when you re-visit your desk. On that note, I guess it is time I wrap this up, and I will do so with some boring shit.
Purchasing Info
After three days of re-formatting my newly refreshed content into the Kindles, Paperback and Hardback Editions, I can confirm that the Kindles are live. If you have already downloaded them, I am not expecting you to buy them again, instead, delete them off your device and download them again on 02/06/2020 where they will be made free for five days. As for the Paperback and Hardback Editions, I am going to upload them on the 29/05/2020, it takes around 24hours for the upload to go through, so on the 30/05/2020 they should be fully updated. If you’re one of those amazing people who already has an older copy, drop me an e-mail and I’ll happily send you a new one.
It is a bit of a fuss, I am aware, and I apologise for the inconvenience this may cause, us creatives are an incredible annoying and at times are an insufferable breed, but I assure you, I only want you to have the best experience because I give a shit with what I put out there. The thing that hurts the most is knowing that Ep1-Dream was not at its strongest when I released it, as specified in my Documentary ‘The Making of Rise’ the process to get it out was a disaster, a disaster I have NEVER quite recovered from. I also want to note that if you’re someone who has read my first book, I thank you, it means the world to me, and if you enjoyed it, that is absolutely wonderful. The readers lens is different to the authors lens, there is an always will be enjoyment to be hard from earlier versions and for all intents and purposes, between the older and newer version, they are the same, only one is written from an evolved eye.
When I return from my walk, I am going to fire up the laptop, open Episode Two and get back to where I was, creating new content and make some progress. With the soft-edit now complete, I can leap straight into the audiobook once the microphone is rigged up. I am excited to get started, switching between Ep1 and Ep2 will be interesting but this has been a long time coming. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great day.
E-mail – taotome@outlook.com
Twitter – @MegasTeque
Author Page UK – https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B01JMZ2BE6
Author Page US – https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01JMZ2BE6
Promotional Material YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-nc_VEmC27AIz6pP51UVkQ?fbclid=IwAR0HQ2NwQ0j_mWWQsaNspzIL5esSGG1CJE6s8phbucO9ZVm2nhwIjLx-new
Promotional Material Bitchute – https://www.bitchute.com/channel/x9K5vwi2SsNu/?fbclid=IwAR209sTifoM-7j_BmCqLL4N04neUWn5ITFcBPr_NTJX6BxkGUX1Xt_cFvxU
The Character Study – https://taoscribe.wordpress.com/2020/04/10/lethaniel-versus-isabelle-a-character-study/
D.W.Gill
Taoteque: The Blog 