Life Update – Audiobook Finished, Back to the Grind

Hey everyone!

I know it’s been a while since I wrote a blog on here, and I’m so sorry for that.  I’ve been trying to ‘keep up with’ posting on Instagram and Facebook, and being the introvert that I am, that…pretty much is all the energy I have, when it comes to social media.

And I’m honestly not sure it’s worth it.

Instagram is no longer a photo app – it’s all about the videos.  Scratch that, it’s all about the reels, which are limited to a minute and a half.  Recording any meaningful content in that short amount of time?  Not easy.  And I had to take something like 30 to 60 takes each time, trying to get it right while compressing the topic to 90 seconds.

I think I might give up on that.  While my initial foray into reels proved promising, with new followers and a couple of comments, it quickly died out, and is stagnant.  Again.

I guess I just suck with social media.  *shrug*

Burning Skies Audiobook Coming Soon!

It’s…been a battle.  I intended to record one audiobook per month once I was furloughed from my day job.  I succeeded with Rise of the Forgotten!  Then I got sick for the month of November with a throat thing.  Started recording in December, made pretty good progress, buuuut….grew increasingly frustrated with the noise in my neighborhood getting worse and worse.

And, well, things just kept getting delayed.  I finally, finally finished recording Burning Skies in January, and started editing.  Editing took a lot longer, because the noise I mentioned in my neighborhood?  It meant that I had to re-record a bunch of sections.

But finally, as of last week, editing is finished!  And I spent the first half of this week listening to Burning Skies “in the wild” to see how an average listener might listen to it.  I found some minor things, about 6 chapters needed breaths removed throughout that somehow wasn’t audible during my editing phase, and a couple of lines needed re-recording, but all in all, I’m really happy with how it turned out!

Especially Nuuldan, the dark dragon?  Oooh.  I channeled Sam Witwer’s version of Darth Maul when I recorded those lines, and they came out sooooo good!  I can’t wait for you all to hear it!

Yesterday, I uploaded all of the files to ACX, and submitted for approval!  So, assuming no quality issues are detected by the ACX techs, Burning Skies should show up on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes in the next 2 weeks!

So despite the setbacks, I battled through, and completed my second Audiobook!

Now…what’s next?

Wellllllllllll….

Assessing The Situation and Adapting

So after all of the delays with Burning Skies, I knew I was running up against a wall, time-wise.  My furlough only allowed me 3 months of paid-for insurance by my employer, and unemployment only allowed a little more than that.  My plan had been to record Rise, then Burning, then start auditioning for jobs to actually get paid for my voice work.

That last part was originally supposed to start in December.

When I hadn’t finished recording Burning Skies until January, I knew my original plan was in big, big trouble.

Then I started looking into how much I could expect to get paid as a voice actor going through ACX, without an agent, without a director or producer or editor, with me doing all of it.

So here’s the thing.  Audiobook narrators, and voice actors in general, don’t get paid for however long it takes them to do the job.  We get paid for a product.  We get paid Per Finished Hour of audio, or PFH.

Let’s say it takes me an hour to record a segment.  That’s an hour of audio, right?  Not necessarily, and especially not as a beginner.  I make mistakes.  I have to re-record.  I’ve learned that, in order to keep my flow on a story, when I mess up, I just immediately re-do that line or wherever a good break is to edit later.  Sometimes that’s only a little bit, and sometimes I mess up a lot.

Then, later, I have to go back and listen to and edit that hour.  Editing involves cutting, adjusting, and generally takes 1.5x as long to do, at least for me (dunno if I’m missing some trick of the trade…)  So that hour recording actually took 2.5 hours of my time to polish, and I may end up actually only having 50 minutes of a final product.  Maybe more, maybe less.

As a beginner, as a nobody on the ACX platform, I could probably expect the lower end of pay for jobs, which is a range of $50 to $100 PFH.

Now, let’s do some math, yeah?  I know, I hate math, too.

Rise of the Forgotten came out to about 10 hours finished.  At the low end, that would mean $500, at the high end, $1000.

In theory, that should have taken me 25 hours to finish, with the 2.5x math, right?  Less than a week, in theory.

It took me longer.  A lot longer.  It basically took me a month from beginning to end.  Now granted, throughout that month, my voice started weak and I couldn’t record for 8 hours a day, so that’s probably why.  Some days I could only do one or two chapters at most, my voice was still recovering from previous days of recording for 6 or more hours.  That’s part of it, your vocal chords are a muscle that need to be strengthened over time.  By the time I finished recording RotF, I was doing pretty good!

But it basically took me a month to finish.

Sooooo…if this was for someone else’s project?  That’s $500-$1000/month.  Before taxes, not  counting medical insurance or anything.  That’s it.

That is not enough to live off of, even in a dual-income home.  Not even close.

So that has led to a…difficult decision.

Back to the Grind – Day Job

After figuring all of that out in January, and knowing that my medical and unemployment benefits were about to run out, I knew I had no choice – I had to go back to a day job.

I really, really didn’t want to.

And I’m so, so incredibly frustrated!!!!  Of course my body decided to get a new illness in the middle of all of this!  Of course I then had to re-build up my vocal chords afterwards and take longer than I should have to record Burning Skies!  Of course everything had to fight me every single step of the way!

At least, that’s been my thoughts lately.  I’m not happy about how it all played out.  This…this was supposed to be my chance.  This was supposed to be how I was able to become a full-time creative.  I didn’t expect to get rich, I didn’t want to get rich, I just wanted a sustainable income!

Maybe, someday, I still can.  It’ll be easier with ‘professional’ gigs, where I have an agent and a producer and I record my work, send it off for someone else to edit, and then move on to the next project.  Maybe, but that’ll mean trying to get an agent to represent me, just for starters.  That’s a big if.

But for now, I have to take care of myself and my family.  I have to make sure we don’t end up on the streets.  And let’s face it, with practically zero social safety nets in the U.S., that’d be a scary prospect.

So I started applying for jobs on indeed.  Sys Admin jobs.  It literally made me nauseous when I first started looking – I not only didn’t want to go back to a 9-5 job, I really didn’t want to go back to the immensely stressful Sys Admin career, where employers increasingly take advantage of employees, adding more and more work and hours without any added pay.

At one point, I started wondering about trying to find other jobs.  Maybe as a proofreader or copy editor.  I started looking at those jobs, and felt like I had a leg up on those, since my Bachelor’s degree was in English.  But a lot of it was ‘gig’ work or temporary contracts, not a reliable source of income at all.

Then I thought…what about technical writing?  I started looking into that.  It looked…promising.  I’d take a definite pay cut, tech writers aren’t paid nearly as much as sys admins, but it was more than I was getting from unemployment by a significant amount, and we’d already proven that, if we had to, we could make that work!  So, why not go for it?

I posted on my private Facebook about thinking about going tech writing as a career, not really thinking anything about it.  But then, that same day, an old co-worker called me up and said he was a manager on a program in dire need of a proper documentation program, and he knew and liked my work in that regard (I’ve always built up the documentation programs for any job I was a sys admin at), and he wanted to hire me!

A few weeks later, and here I am, about to start not just a new day job, but a new career!

I’m excited.  I’m terrified.  I’m anxious.  I’m all over the board about it!  But one thing is for sure – I’ll be glad to have a steady paycheck again.

For more than one reason.

What’s Next?

Remember how I was saying that my neighborhood was getting worse and worse with noise?  Well, honestly, worse and worse in general.  This apartment complex is utter shit, the management company that took over after we moved in is horrible (Seriously, second time Greystar has taken over an apartment while we lived there and turned it to shit!  How are they surviving as a company??)

So with a steady paycheck again, we’re gonna move to a better apartment/neighborhood.  One that doesn’t stress us out, and one that won’t interfere with my ability to record audio.

Until then?  No more recording.  It’s too frustrating.

But once I’m settled into my day job and get a new daily routine going, I will continue writing and publishing novels.  The Sword of Dragons needs book 5, and Project Sirius book 2 needs to come out this year!

I don’t plan on publishing Sirius 2 until after we move, though.

I’m going to probably pull back from Instagram – it’s just not worth the effort I put into my videos, I get no engagement.

I’m probably going to delete my Patreon.  Absolutely no one seems to give a shit about it or has any interest in supporting me through that platform, so no sense keeping it online.

But overall, for the next few months, I’m going to focus on two things – moving, and mental/emotional health.

I’ve worked for employers who don’t give two shits about me for too long.  I’m hopeful that this new job won’t be like that (the manager’s a pretty cool guy!), but either way, I’m going to focus more on taking care of me, and being healthy and better.

I have no doubt that this new year is going to be full of even more change.

I’ll try to be better about keeping you all in the loop here.  After all, this blog is a better avenue for that – I’m a writer!  Writing is what I do best :)

Assuming anyone is still around reading this, and assuming anyone has read all the way to the bottom of this rather long post, thank you for your support and patience!

Until next time!
-Jon Wasik

How Do You Pick Yourself Up?

It’s a given that every writer, at some point in their career, will stumble.  More than once.  Sometimes, they even fall.  Most often early on, sometimes in the middle of their career, sometimes at the end, and frequently more than once.

So how do you pick yourself back up afterwards?  How do you move on?  How do you silence the doubts and insecurities that arise from such a stumble?

If you came here looking for an answer to that question, I’m not sure I have it.  There’s a few pearls of wisdom I’ve picked up that I try to remind myself every day, but by themselves, they aren’t the answers.  For starters, did you notice I said stumble and fall, but not fail?

That’s because I’ve always been told “You’re not a failure unless you give up.”  God have I thought about that a lot.  Used it as a way to assure myself I’ve not actually failed at writing in any way, not really.

But as any writer can tell you, sometimes that’s little comfort.

And not just writers.  Story tellers in general.  Movie producers and directors, musicians, game producers.  How many times have we seen something a company or person pushed hard for, only for it to fall flat on its face on them?

Were they wrong to believe in their product?

Am I wrong to believe in mine?

Because I still do believe in Chronicles of the Sentinels.  Not just the story, but the writing, too.  I know it’s not for everyone, but I’m more proud of it than anything I’ve previously written.  I think it’s my strongest work.

I also think that about the Sword of Dragons book 4 (currently in the hands of a first beta reader.)  But my experiences with Legacy has me scared.  Doubtful, even.  Thinking “Book 4 is awesome.  Which means it’s probably going to fail.”

I hate thinking that way.  It’s self-destructive, it’s…I dunno.  Unhealthy is an understatement.  But I can’t stress to you how much I thought Legacy was going to be the first stepping stone to something bigger.  Something greater.  A new, positive chapter in my writing career.

Instead, I feel like it’s been a giant stumble.  What’s worse, you’re supposed to learn from these experiences, right?  Except, I’m still not sure what went wrong.  I’ve never had beta readers be so excited about something I’ve written before, so enthusiastic.

I’ve never been as enthusiastic about a story as I have this one.  I love Sword of Dragons, it’s been a passion project for me for decades, but I felt in my gut, in my bones that Chronicles of the Sentinels would change everything, would catapult me out of the ‘eh, he’s okay’ category and into a ‘wow, let’s keep an eye on him, I can’t wait to see what he does next!’ category.

And now…every project I work on, I feel scared.  I feel beat down.  I feel like maybe it doesn’t matter how hard I try anymore, because no one will believe in me again.

Retribution is better than Legacy, by and large, but will any of the people who read Legacy bother with book 2?  Will I go from the strongest day 1 opening for Legacy to the weakest ever for Retribution?  Will anyone even bother to pre-order Retribution?  Let alone book 3?  Will anyone care when Sword of Dragons 4 comes out in a year or so?

And what of this new YA Sci-Fi I’m writing?  Or trying to.

That leads me back to the title of today’s article – how do you pick yourself back up?  Because every time I think of picking my newest project back up, I think “Do I really want to endure another massive disappointment?”  Because just like Sentinels, I think this new YA Sci -Fi is something special, something amazing, something that will give young people a new character to look up to and identify with, while telling a unique and interesting story that’s never been told before.

Better still, it could easily be the first in a long-enduring series where each story is as engaging and unique as the previous, and will give readers someone to ‘grow up with’ so to speak, or at least to watch grow up and grow into her own person, to overcome prejudice, to overcome a rigid society that would never accept her as she truly is….

And now I’m digressing.  But the point is….I want to finish this story, because I believe in it.  I’m halfway through it, and it’d easily be something I would love to start 2023’s publication schedule with (sooner if I had the time and energy, but with 3 books planned for publication in 2022, I’m already swamped in that regard.)

I believe in these stories.  I believe in the characters.  In the writing.

But I’m afraid few others will.

I’ve endured a lot of negativity from others in my life.  I was teased incessantly, sometimes brutally as a child and teen, bullied far too much.  Eventually, I learned to brush it off and even just ignore it.  Yet nothing ever hurt so much as seeing those first 2-star ratings of Legacy.

I know, I know, since then more positive ones have come in (at least on Amazon,) and there may be people out there who liked it but don’t rate or review it (seriously, why is it so hard to get people to leave ratings or reviews???)  But Legacy still pales in comparison to Sword of Dragons.  Maybe I just need to be patient.  Maybe Sword of Dragons does so well because there’s 3 main books and a side book out, where as Sentinels only has one book so far.  Maybe things will turn better when all 3 books are out.

Maybe.

I hope.

*sigh*

This…turned into a longer post than I planned, a lot of it negative.  But as I said in a previous post, I promised to chronicle my journey as a writer here, both the triumphs and the struggles.  To only talk about the wins and not the losses would be a lie of omission, and I want to give whomever still follows my blog a genuine, authentic journey.

I wanted to talk about other things today, but maybe I’ll save that for another post, maybe I’ll write it tomorrow if I can muster the energy.  I’m considering a change in direction for how I present my social media presence, but…well, we’ll see.  I’ve got some thinking to do.

Thanks for reading, and if there’s one Christmas, Birthday, and/or New Years gift you as a reader could give me, it’s not just a like on this post or a positive comment, it’s a rating on Amazon or Goodreads.  Better still, let your friends and family know about my books, help me find my audience.  Help my audience find me.

Thanks for reading,
-Jon Wasik