Row, Row, Row Yer Boat…

Zoë Sharp

I’m all for a challenge and I genuinely enjoy acquiring new skills. It’s probably for this reason that I am au fait with the basics of building a dry stone wall, what to do when passengering a Formula 2 sidecar outfit, how to use an electric arc welder, or the etiquette of engaging in a sword fight. You never know when such knowledge will come in handy.

Yup, that's me on the back, lapping Mallory Park!

I confess, though, it wasn’t entirely with research in mind that I ventured out onto the waters of the River Derwent this week to try my hand at rowing. This past winter, I’ve been plagued by increasingly painful back problems and have been advised by my physio that I need to do some physical exercise beyond giving my brain a workout at a computer keyboard, or undertaking general DIY.

Neither of which count, apparently.

So, considering the Captain of the Derwent Rowing Club, Lewis Hancock, is not only a friend but also the very fine narrator of two of my audiobooks, what better place to start?

Lewis Hancock, at the audiobook recording of DANCING ON THE GRAVE

“Be sure to bring a change of clothes,” was his somewhat ominous warning beforehand. I did so. Including shoes. And a towel.

My only experience of rowing has either been a) on a machine in a gym, or b) in an inflatable dinghy getting from yacht to shore when nobody can be bothered to attach the outboard motor.

Neither of which, I discovered, adequately prepares you for rowing on a river in a specialised craft designed for that purpose and no other.

For a start, the rowlocks are not called rowlocks. Neither are they attached directly to the sides of the boat. Instead, they are spaced away from each side on an outrigger with a swivel, a pin and a gate at the end of it. Into the gate goes your oar, with a squared-off sleeve in the appropriate place so when you present the blade of the oar to the water, it’s likely to be at the same angle, time after time.

Unlike the aforementioned inflatable dinghy—but in common with the rowing machine—these craft have a sliding seat so, as you lift the oars clear of the water and feather them, you slide forwards and bend your knees, providing maximum leverage for the next stroke.

Of course, getting the hang of keeping your left hand over the top of your right at all times, sticking to your own side of the river without getting tangled up in the overhanging trees of the bank, and avoiding other watercraft—or shouting in enough time that they avoid you—is akin to patting the top of your head and at the same time rubbing your stomach, reciting poetry, and tap-dancing.

Whilst balanced on a girder.

And in case you were wondering why there are no selfies taken of me actually out on the river in the aptly named Yellow Peril, that’s because there was absolutely no way I was going to carry something so susceptible to water damage on my first time out.

the Yellow Peril. (yellow being a warning colour in nature...)

I’m happy to report, however, that I did not hit anybody else on the water. Neither did they hit me. Nor did I collide with overhanging trees, or anything other than the landing stage of the Derwent RC boathouse. And then it was merely a gentle return to safe harbour.

So there.

But did I enjoy it? Well, yes. It was strangely peaceful, energetic and hypnotic in the rhythm of the thing. Frustrating when my co-ordination failed me, and immensely satisfying when I managed to put together a run of maybe half a dozen decent strokes. At which point the stout little Yellow Peril put on a surprising turn of speed.

And will I be going back?

You betcha.

This week’s Word of the Week is mustang, which as well as being a wild horse, and a model of Ford, is also naval slang for an officer who has come up through the ranks from ordinary seaman to any rank above warrant officer. He—or she—is therefore supposedly wise to the tricks pulled by those in the lower ranks.

Talking of Books: A Look At Audio

Zoë Sharp

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about writing fiction was to read the words aloud. Reading your own work really helps you to pinpoint those clunky bits of narrative or dialogue, or those descriptive scenes that go on for just a bit too long.

Better yet, I’ve found, is to get somebody else to read your work back to you. After all, you as the author know how the rhythm of the story should run and where the emphasis should go for maximum dramatic effect.

"Listen very carefully. I will say this only once..."

But, if those clues are not present in the way the words are presented on the page, then your reader is never going to be able to reproduce that same rhythm in their head. I’ve always believed that more than the subject matter, the characters or the plot, it’s the individual voice of the writer that turns casual readers into continuing fans.

When you pick up a book by an author unknown to you, before you’ve finished the first paragraph—often even the opening sentence—you just know if you like the sound of that writer’s voice. I had this with the first Robert B Parker novel I picked up, the first Ken Bruen and the first Lee Child. More recently, I happened across the Wyatt Storme series by WL Ripley. They all have such a distinctive style that flicks a switch inside my head. Something in the back of my mind goes, “Yes!” and I have to read on.

I confess I have this same feeling when I start to listen to an audiobook by a particular narrator. There are some books by authors I love, but I simply can’t stand the way the narrator sounds. And vice versa, some narrators are so good, I’d listen to them read from their shopping list if I got the chance.

Much as listening to Rowan Atkinson go through an imaginary school register is a riot, for some reason I’ve never found his Mr Bean character funny.

Lewis Hancock falls firmly into the category of narrators I could listen to all day. (I wonder if I could persuade him to record that Rowan Atkinson sketch…?) I know I’m not the only person who thinks so. I’ve listened to all kinds of books he’s read, some of which would not have been my usual choice. But with Lewis speaking the words to me, I am invariably glued to the story.

I was lucky enough to have Lewis as the narrator for THE BLOOD WHISPERER and he made a wonderful job of it. I have to confess, though, that the extract they chose for Amazon UK sample is taken from the one mildly kinky sex scene in the book, which I’m not sure is entirely representative. I swear I can hear the smile in Lewis’s voice as he’s reading it.

Last week, I spent a day in Manchester at Greenbank Studios in Sale, listening to Lewis record part of DANCING ON THE GRAVE, which came out in print and digital formats last year. The audio edition will be out very soon from Oakhill.

Lewis spends a lot of time before he gets to the recording stage prepping a print-out of the manuscript. He adds his own punctuation so he’s not taken by surprise by convoluted sentence construction—although I do try not to include too much of that.

Lewis Hancock, in an uncharacteristic serious moment.

He also checks pronunciation of unfamiliar places and names, and chooses suitable voices for the different characters if they’re not specified in the text. (And there’s nothing worse, he reckons, than mentally rehearsing one accent for a character, only to find out near the end of the story that they speak with another. Or—worse still—it not being mentioned until book two…)

The technician at the studio was Liam Wheatley. It was his job not only to handle the actual recording of the narrative, but to monitor the quality of the sound and check for errors.

Liam Wheatley at the flight deck.

Watching Liam work was amazing. Originally from a screenwriting background, he’s been working for Greenbank since 2014 and can actually read the waveform of the audio track. So, if there was unexpected background noise, or Lewis tripped up on a sentence, he was able to instantly pinpoint the location. He’d take the cursor back to partway through the last clean section, which he’d play to Lewis in the sound booth next door, cutting back to recording just before the error so Lewis could pick up the narrative again. And he did it in less time than it’s just taken me to explain the process.

This means that Lewis feels able to stop and go back if there’s a piece he’s just read that he’s not happy with, without worrying about slowing the job down too much.

Liam also follows the text on screen, and pays enough attention to point out the occasional missed or transposed word. Sadly, not everybody takes such care over the text.

He takes just as much trouble over post-production. The system he uses, Pro Tools, marks all the pick-up points so Liam can go back later to close up any extended pauses. He also removes any page-turning noises, mouth clicks or breaths. Having listened to THE BLOOD WHISPERER, as well as other recordings done by this partnership, I can vouch for the quality of Liam’s work.

Spending the day watching Lewis and Liam work was illuminating. Here are just a few of the notes I took during it:

• Try to pick names that are easy to pronounce quickly, unlike Frederickson, Blenkinship, and Sibson.
• Quick swaps between characters with very different accents can be very tricky.
• Exciting bits flowed better. It seemed easier with some impetus behind the words.
• It’s very hard when using a Geordie (Newcastle) accent, to have a character say angrily, “With all due respect, sir!” and not have him come out sounding Scottish.
• The words "bull bars" can sound remarkably like "ball bars", which conjures up entirely the wrong image!
• It would make life much easier for the narrator if you invented a character who spoke with a stutter or a lot of phlegm in his voice…

So, my question this week is, do you listen to audiobooks more now than you used to? Do you follow certain authors or certain narrators particularly? What irritates you about an audiobook recording? What do you like best about them?

My thanks to Lewis and to Liam for their patience and forbearing. I tried not to stick my oar in too often, guys!

If you’re looking to have an audio recording made of your work, it would be well worth talking to Liam at Greenbank Studios. Contact him at GreenbankLiam@gmail.com.

This week’s Word of the Week is vicissitude, meaning a passing from one state to another, an alternation, mutation or change, usually for the worse. It comes from the Latin vicis meaning change.

Upcoming Events:

March 8-10

CRIME & PUBLISHMENT—The Mill Forge, Gretna

Workshops on Getting Your Action Scenes Right

Caro Ramsay is also teaching at this event—Breaking Bones For Fun

May 9-12

CRIMEFEST INTERNATIONAL CRIME FICTION CONVENTION—Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel, Bristol

Friday, May 10, 13:40-14:30

Contemporary Issues: Reflecting How We Live

Candy Denman, Paul Gitsham, Cara Hunter, Amanda Robson, Zoë Sharp (Participating Moderator)

Saturday, May 11, 11:20-12:10

Ten Year Stretch: The CrimeFest Short Story Anthology

Peter Guttridge, Caro Ramsay, Zoë Sharp, Michael Stanley (Stan Trollip), Kate Ellis (Participating Moderator)

Sunday, May 12, 09:30-10:20

The Indie Alternative

Beate Boeker, Adam Croft, Barry Faulkner, Lynn Florkiewicz, Zoë Sharp (Participating Moderator)

On Hearing Someone Else Read It

Almost all of us here at MIE have had our stories published as audio books.  I am bringing up this topic in the hopes of starting a discussion on how we and other writers feel about the experience of listening to our own work coming out of someone else’s mouth.  And how readers of this blog feel about “reading” with their ears.

The only MIE author I ever heard from on this subject was Leighton Gage, who advised me about this, as he did about so many other things that a published author needs to know.  He told me that mid-list authors like me almost never have any input whatsoever on who and how the books are recorded.  He complained that the man who read his stories screwed up the pronunciations of the Brazilian names—people’s and places.  But all in all he thought it was better to have the book recorded than not.  As in almost all things, I agree with his assessment.

I am a book addict.  I take them any way I can, and that includes listening.  I prefer to sit and read, but like most New Yorkers I walk as a means of transportation.  Getting from one place to another gives me time to tune in to great stories on my phone, increasing the number of books I can “read.”  I particularly like doing this with books I have already read, as I did recently with the brilliant John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  I could not have taken the time to reread it while sitting in a chair, but I was mightily glad to experience the work again while plowing my way through the throngs of tourists in midtown or strolling back and forth to the grocery store.

When I was reading Lisa Brackmann’s brilliant Rock, Paper, Tiger, I was in a particularly difficult and busy period of my life.  The book was a wonderful escape for me, and once I got into the story it made me want to stay in it, but I just couldn’t put together enough time to satisfy the intensity of my curiosity about how it would turn out.  So I downloaded it from Audible and read part of it and listened to part.  I really liked it in both formats.  Now her Hour of the Rat has been nominated for an Anthony for Best Audio Book.  I have read it sitting down but now am in the process of listening to it too.  My take: the narrator does a wonderful job of portraying the edginess of the story and of communicating Lisa’s riveting combination of wonder, wry commentary, and anxiety.  I hope Lisa will weigh in on her reactions to this.  Ditto for my other blogmates.

I was not able to find audio versions of Caro’s stories.  That might be a blessing for her as a writer.  Because there is that chance, as Leighton warned me, that one’s story will be mangled.  The first two Audible versions of mine—Invisible Country and Blood Tango—were less than successful from my point of view.  With Invisible Country, the first of my recorded books, I did not expect to find the Guarani names pronounced correctly.  I tried to keep my expectations low.  They were not low enough.

The voice-over artist is a man, an understandable choice since it is an anti-war novel and is certainly as much a man’s story as a woman’s.  My difficulty was in the voices the reader gave to my characters.  The Paraguayan townswomen all speak in breathy whispers.  Even the ultra-religiously devout Maria Claudia sounds like a bad imitation of Marilyn Monroe.  The lector gives a foreign-language accent to only one character: Tomas Pereira da Graça, an aristocratic Brazilian.  The text says he has an accent.  He speaks Spanish with an upper class Portuguese accent.  In the audio version, he speaks in English, of course, but with a cheesy, comical Spanish accent.  Think “My name Jose Jimenez.” UGHHH!

The reader of Blood Tango is a woman with a Spanish accent.  She does a good job, except for the fact that she almost invariably puts the greatest emphasis on prepositions.  (In my mind, I was saying, “TROUBLE was closing in on Buenos Aires.”  She read: “Trouble was closing in ON Buenos Aires.”)  I am not sure a non-Spanish speaking listener would even understand that she is saying “Buenos Aires.”  She speaks the names of the places and people in the story very quickly in Spanish.  An American person experiencing the story only audibly will not have the advantage of the seeing, for instance “Campo de Mayo” spelled out.  If she had pronounced it distinctly—Cahm-po day Maio, it would not have been a problem, but she slurs it.  Imagine the FedEx commercial guy trying to say this: cmodmyo.  I imagine that the sense of place pretty much disappears from the audio version of that book since there would be no way for people not intimately familiar with the landscape to get what I am talking about.  Can people listening in English even identify the characters’ names clearly enough to distinguish them from one another?  Hard to tell.  Ah well.

BUT NOW: the audio version of Strange Gods came out last week along with the book.  I am delighted to say that the voice-over artist does a wonderful job. He’s a South African named Dennis Kleinman.  I looked him up.  He was easy to find.

He speaks the narration with a more or less neutral British accent, in which I picked up a tiny note of the South Africa here and there.  He absolutely aces the dialog, doing upper class English, Scots, and tribes people.  Sometimes the cadence of the narrative is not exactly how it sounds in my own head, but all in all his reading is quite wonderful.  My characters sound so real in his voice.  One of them is a bombastic District Commissioner, whom the narrator makes every bit as authoritarian, patronizing, and obnoxious as I imagined him to be.  My story was safe with Dennis Kleinman.

So what about you?  Do you listen to books?  Do you listen to your own work?  If so, what’s your take on hearing your words read aloud by a stranger?  If you listen to audio books, how do you feel about the skill of the people who read them?  Let’s talk.

Annamaria - Monday