my podbang <3
boring mod reflections
okay, so. i've never modded an exchange before, and i found the experience really interesting. i learned a lot! there are some things that would have worked better if i'd removed some flexibility for participants, but i'm not sure that's a bargain i'm willing to make. we'll see how we feel about it next year, i guess.
there was a moment, around 17 or 18 december, when i realized granting extensions might have been a very bad idea. but! then i was totally proven wrong! everyone who said they would come through did! and the people who didn't actually were upfront about the idea that an extension might not help.
next year, we either won't schedule the reveal date on the same day as the submission deadline for yuletide, or i won't participate in yuletide. /o\ i still can't believe i did that. i think i aged ten years monday, seriously.
superstitiousme and i did the matching of readers and recipients, and i think it took us both days, and we wound up with two totally different lists that were both kind of broken -- i think we could each match most of the people up, and then both had people left over who didn't match each other at all. but different people! so then we took both lists and aggregated them together until they worked. next year we're doing it with software other than our brains, i can tell you that right now.
on finding a story
so i was matched as a reader to blacksquirrel, on two shared fandoms: buffy the vampire slayer and due south. and i was very excited! i had several awesome buffy stories already on my to do list!
except.
well, her two off-limits items were unhappy endings and character death, and her optional comments asked for nothing xander-centric. meaning her taste and my taste are not really aligned, there. so back to the drawing board. which is good, actually - i mean, it isn't like i'm not still going to record those various depressing and/or xandery buffyverse epics, so this was an opportunity to look in another direction. and she gave a fantastically massive list of fandoms to choose from! so i made a short list of which ones i was interested in: jeremiah, pirates of the caribbean, sherlock holmes, veronica mars. and then i started looking. and looking. and looking.
after a few frustrating days, i narrowed to holmes. i figured, hey! i know holmes fans! and there's a fandom that's been around for freaking *ever*. there have to be epics, right? so i started looking, and i pm'ed people to ask for recs of really long stories. preferably with a good mystery!
yeah. so i have helpful friends, but i realized very quickly that "really long" means different things in different fandoms. i have never been so grateful for my wordcount firefox plugin, which at least allowed me to eliminate almost everything i looked at. finally, success! an author who came very highly recommended (katieforsythe) had written something relatively recently that was long enough! and of *course* it was the second of two companion stories, but whatever.
then there was the nervewracking bit where i messaged her for permission and quietly freaked out worrying about my lack of options should she say no. but she didn't. :)
reading my story
so, melodrama. this story was fun to read, but the style is in a way very much of its canon -- full of drama and intensity. and OMG is that ever exhausting. i mean, i do most of my podfic in snappy, snarky sg:a and due south, and even the depressing epics for those fandoms are...well, the prose itself is lighter, and the pov is contemporary, and i don't have to push emotion into every single damn word, if that makes any sense. irony and obliviousness are easy for me to read! intensity and focus are not.
i started with violin, and wow, it took me forever. something about the watson pov syntax would not fit my natural phrasing, and i swear i flubbed every single sentence at least once (when i edited the file, i cut 50 minutes of flubs. i always have a high error rate, but usually it's more like 8 or so minutes per hour).
and then there's the french. /o\
okay, so i have francxiety. seriously! i am not entirely certain why, but while i'll bluster through and give my best effort to czech and latin and any number of conlangs, french scares the crap out of me. so there i was, reading along, and...FRENCH! i stopped in my tracks. i tried, halfheartedly, but then i wound up clapping my hands to mark the spot and kept reading, so i could insert it later. and then i emailed anatsuno. who is awesome. she recorded a tutorial for me! she gave the history of the quotations, and told me about why they were pronounced the way they are (kind of like poetry, and with a set phrasing). and she sang them! :D and then aphelant saw me panicking, and asked if it would be helpful if she made me a file, too! so i could hear it as read by a native english speaker. and she slowed it way, way down, so i could mimic and speed up gradually.
between the two of them, i got to the point where i could record one phrase at a time, then edit until it sounded like i was saying it all at once, more or less. i mean, i am still pretty sure i mangled it, but! without their help i'm not sure i could have made myself do it at all. sadly, the background silence in the recording wound up really different from the main file, even though i recorded in the same space. so it's pretty easy to tell that it's pasted in. i am sad about that, but i did what i could. next time i will find the french bits before i start reading and choose a different story be ready ahead of time.
hallowed was actually a lot easier and flowed better for me. i need to go back and look at the stories again, but i think it's that the watson pov is far less certain, and much more polite, in a very formal way. in hallowed, the holmes pov is very definite and straightforward. but he's an intense guy, youknow? so i glowered the whole time i was reading. i have never frowned so much for so long in my life, i swear. it kind of made my head ache. dear mr holmes: i am glad i am not you! he probably had headache all the time, what with the intensity and the braininess and the drugs.
probably podfic editing is one of the torments in hell
no, no, i kid. editing is not that bad. it's just: i can't stay awake while editing my own files. i am a multitasker! i multitask pretty much the entire time i am awake, every day. and podfic editing takes your hands, and your ears, and your eyes, and it's not a great idea to have other applications going on your computer. i can sort of cook while editing, as long as it's just the watch a pot and stir occasionally kind of cooking (i did burn at least one dinner fairly spectacularly doing that, though, come to think of it). so i tend to sit on the sofa or the bed, looking for mouth noises and listening for flubs, and i totally zone out, and sometimes fall asleep completely. :|
that's where my need for a beta comes in -- i need someone to tell me if i missed edits due to unconsciousness. and if anyone does hear repeated phrases in my work, please tell me so i can fix them! i drank a lot of coffee to try to edit properly, but it only helped sometimes.
but! i was also, thankfully, editing files for other people, too. which is fun! mostly because even if i have read their story before, i haven't done so recently, so there's suspense! i want to know what happens next. and i get to hear their error styles, which are different than mine -- both where they screw up and how they deal with it.
my edit rate for my own work is a pretty predictable four-to-one -- it takes four hours of editing for every one hour of finished recording. turns out, i have learned to visually edit one other reader well enough that i can edit her files at something slightly faster than two-to-one. it's amazingly fast! when i edit myself, it's a mix of editing by listening and editing by looking, but i need both -- with her, the editing is *so* visual that i'm only listening to verify that i got everything -- so i am editing several minutes ahead in the file of where it's playing. and then there's the reader who i have been trying to edit by listening, because i don't trust myself to do it visually. yeah. i need to start trusting myself fast, because my edit rate for her? eighteen-to-one. eighteen hours to edit one hour! and i've actually been told by another editor working on a different piece of the file that visually editing it is a snap, and really fast. i have only just started thinking about visual editing versus listening editing! i am currently fascinated by this.
anyway. i had an awesome podbang! i am already looking forward to next year. <3