First off, I want to thank everyone who took part in C. L. Cannon’s Bookfest. For my part I had a lot of fun, met some great new people, and expanded my To Be Read list exponentially.

They say that life is a marathon, not a sprint. They say good things come to those who wait. They say lots of stuff. None of it’s pertinent here today.

Last year, after we got all our ducks in a row and got SPLICE: HIT BIT TECHNOLOGY released, the nice people at ©Watch Dog Entertainment™LLC asked me to create an audio book. That’s where the fun began.

Just for the record, I have produced audio and video at the professional level. So, ability issues were not the problem. Nope, the problem is that my apartment has reflective surfaces everywhere. I sounded like I was in an echo chamber.

Not appealing.

Finally, after several local studios couldn’t fit me in, Stan Skora from Black Parrot Music offered to record me. The only problem was scheduling. His Illinois studio is a forty-five minute drive and I don’t have a car. Or a driver’s license. So we worked it out that my fiancée would drive me. This meant we could only record on weekends since she has a job.

It’s even one she wants to keep. Nice people, good company, plenty of room for advancement, and so on. She’s not going to throw that away so I could sit in a small room and listen to the sound of my voice.

Simply put, it was slow going, but it progressed. However, as time went on my injured knee kept getting worse, as in standing for more than five minutes was painful, and my doctors couldn’t schedule “elective” surgery due to the pandemic. Toss in lost weeks due to each of us getting exposed to COVID-19, end of the year holidays, and me finally getting put under the knife, things crawled to a stop.

Post surgery I, stupidly, thought I could be back at full strength in a few days. However, when they used the phrase “here are the bone fragments we found floating in your leg” I really should have known better. It took four weeks for me to be strong enough to enter physical therapy. By then Stan was getting ready to return to his home in Melbourne. That would be too much of a commute from Chicago.

We ran some options through our squishy brains and came up with a solution. Essentially a way for me to have a home studio and not sound like the voice in a 1950s horror movie ad. Now, having completed physical therapy, as in I can stand and walk up and down stairs – not run a marathon, we are finally back in business.

In other words, this a long-winded way of saying you’re going to get an audio book of SPLICE: HIT BIT TECHNOLOGY later this year. Since this is a whole new process for me I don’t want to put a hard time-line on things, but please know this bad boy is getting made.

One thing I have learned from this whole ordeal is that I’ll never do something like this again. People who do this professionally will happily take my money and I’m more than willing to give it to them. Heck, if something like this darkens my doorstep again I’ll even be a little anxious to do so.

I think that’s enough for one day. I’ll be back with more good news next week. Until then, stay safe, sane, and inside.