A Note from Spencer Hawke on Audiobooks

“ME?” “I am not an actor, my voice is strange, I’m not a Voice Over Artist. At most parties I don’t talk very much, unless I stiffen my resolve with a martini!”

“So what’s the problem?” you ask.
You’ve obviously never met my editor, say I.
“So?” you say.
She is not very tall, but she packs the punch of a Texan Longhorn.
“She can’t be that bad,” you assure me.
Let me put it this way, a Texas Rainbow Cactus has the prettiest flower in Springtime, but ya still don’t want to sit on one!

My editor pairs me up with a tech-guru … Fearing my first Voice Over Audition, we email back and forth. He suggests I come to his recording studio, way the heck out of town, “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of days” says he confidently. All I can see is the face of a Las Vegas slot machine, “CaShing, CaShing, CaShing!” I can’t possibly afford that, not at least not with my voice,
“ABSURD idea…” I tell him.
My first attempt is a disaster. Techy Dude listens to my audio, “What’s all that WHITE NOISE? “White Noise?” I ask ignorantly.
“It sounds like you have a bulldozer in the recording studio.”
I didn’t want to tell him I was doing this on my iPad in my home office and the bulldozer he hears is my air conditioning unit; it’s bloody 105 degrees here!
Around and around we go. “WHITE NOISE!” his emails bellow. I furiously type back “WHAT BLOODY NOISE?!”
After many, many false trials, I wait for all the family to leave, I switch OFF my A/C (YES IN THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER!) I even switch off every fan in the house. I’m ready to go to my new recording studio. Then a great big pick-up hauling a trailer pulls up outside my neighbor’s yard. Her lawn mowing people have just arrived. DO you KNOW how BLOODY LOUD those things are?

(Anything is loud when you’re recording.)

The sweat is dripping down my brow, but the mowing is finished. I sneak off to my studio. It is in fact my CLOSET, a mouse hole of a room where the clothes insulate me from WHITE NOISE. I am ready with a jug of water, a rag to mop my brow, my trusty iPhone and microphone.

Two days later, I get an email back from my tech-guru, the subject line, GREAT JOB. I think to myself ‘Yeah right…” With much trepidation I read his email. “Well at least he’s not yelling at me, I think.” Across the bottom of the email is a link to his professionally engineered work of my recording.

I am BLOODY AMAZED. I love it; it’s really good. Over my years perusing headlines, I have read of all different types of “CLOSET” people. Now I have to admit I am one; I’m a Closet Voice Artist. If you ever fly over Oklahoma, the pilot might warn you of turbulence ahead, don’t worry, tis only I, practicing my lines in my sweatbox of a recording studio. But you know what? I’m having more fun than any human being has a right to.

A love for adventure as a young boy, travel across the African continent as a young man and a brief stint in Sao Paulo fed into the over-active imagination of Spencer Hawke to produce a plethora of interesting projects. His first work, The Eyes of Athena — the first in the Ari Cohen series — is now being produced as an audiobook. From his home base in Oklahoma City, Spencer spends his days with wife, Jenny, and grandson Devon, already an avid adventurer, and is always working on his next four of five projects …

Anybody can become a VO artist!

Spencer Hawke is one of the brave authors trying out Audiobook Edge. If you want your clean mystery, scifi, fantasy, or thriller reviewed then placed on a monthly list to readers who love audiobooks, join us on Audiobook Edge for Authors/Narrators! If you’d prefer to see loads of free audiobooks every month, check out the Reader version.