Well, this is a bit after the fact, but I had the opportunity to take a journey with Pat Fraley and Scott Brick this past weekend here in San Diego – a journey to discover my potential recording audiobooks.

I’ve been keeping my eye on Pat’s workshops for a while, but just wasn’t able to carve out the time to spend the weekend in LA, so when they were looking for participants for a workshop in my neck of the woods, I jumped – as did 11 others from around the country – including Hawaii.

My focus was Fiction – looking for the right kind of pieces for my voice and brain. Long form non-fiction is something I do on a regular basis, but Fiction has been on the back burner. So getting a chance to work with two pros on several excerpts and ending up with a good marketable fiction demo was worth the money. (And being close to home was a good thing too.)

Getting a chance to be directed by both Scott and Pat was inspiring. I will admit that I didn’t spend a lot of time preparing for the workshop – work and life got in the way. I went through my books and pulled 4 or 5 off the shelves and leafed through them looking for something that I thought would work.

I needed to end up with three pieces that included a dialogue piece with a man and a woman, a third person delivery and a first person delivery. But I was supposed to have transcribed it – not try to read from the books. So we photocopied the pages, bumping them up in size a bit and I worked from that…which was actually good because I was able to start earlier in one segment than I had initially planned and continue on after my stopping point in another.

Part of being in a group workshop is stealing – uh learning – from the rest of the participants. It is always interesting to hear what someone elses’s brain will do to a sentence. You learn a lot by just listening to other be directed and watching their journey.

Most of the people in the class were not working voiceover professionals – but there were many with acting backgrounds, including a working on-camera actress. But everyone was smart and articulate and literate – and watching them take direction and move forward was a real pleasure. There were a couple of times where nerves took over and a particular selection to a long time to come together. But those same people bounced back for their next selection.

Pat refers to this process as the “journey.”

I’m looking down the road now to the next stop on my personal journey toward landing a fiction contract. After that? Who knows. But one of my goals would be to impress the teachers with an Audie.