A brown paper box showed up on my doorstep today. Exciting in itself as I almost never get packages. Then I noticed the return address: Dog Ear Audio, Guffey Colorado. Suddenly my pulse started racing. This is it! The product of hours of labor: My novel, “The Middle of Somewhere,” as an audio book with me reading it. How did I get so lucky?

When I did my very first author reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz back in February ’09, one of the main comments I got was, “You should make a recording of you reading your book.” Of course I smiled and said “thank you” while inwardly thinking, that’ll never happen. Most books never get audio books made. The time and money involved is too prohibitive.Shortly after my first public reading of The Middle of Somewhere, I got a call from my publisher saying a startup audio books company had contacted her about wanting to record my novel. Before I knew what I was thinking, I said, “Awesome!” Then added, “I’m sure they have their own talent, but I’d sure love to read it myself.” Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

Flash forward to a month later and my partner and I landing in Guffey, Colorado to start the amazing process of recording my novel. I was in a tiny recording studio with an even tinier window looking out onto Pattie, the engineer. She and I spent 6 days, five hours a day, with me reading the text into the microphone and her watching the sounds waves of my voice on her computer screen. (For a more detailed description click here. Andi Marquette, fellow author, observed for a day then wrote a killer description of the process.)While Karen, of Dog Ear Audio, worked on the visual and marketing aspects of the audio book, and make sure we got fed!

I had no idea how much work it was going to take. I also had no idea how many tongue twisters I’d written. “Damn whoever wrote this!” I’d curse between retakes. It was also a struggle to keep up with the many individual voices I was using for each of the characters. It was fine in a scene with two characters, but when they all showed up in a scene, like at the end, I really had to pay attention. (And I’m trained in this stuff!) But what I most unprepared for was the emotional ride I took me while reading the novel out loud. I cherished each character as they made their appearances, cursed a few typos, and, most surprising of all, cried at the end. That’s right, I cried. Pattie had to stop the recording and bring me a tissue.

Now here it is, that whole experience tucked into a little box of eight CDs, complete with recipe cards. You get Piggin’s Melt in Your Mouth Biscuits, Heifer’s Green Rice Casserole, and Piggin’s Popcorn Balls.

See? Dreams do come true.

Order the audio book.