Writing, Publishing & Authorship : 9-17-25

This session discusses audiobook creation and editing in some detail and gives updates on recent projects that are in the works.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hey, how's it going? We're hanging out.
This is writing, publishing and authorship.
My name is Michael Finney. I'll run down a little bit of
the news highlights for you since the last episode 2 weeks
ago. I always put this stuff up into
the nest on the Twitter space, so if you're not catching that

(00:26):
then this is a little bit of update from the past to the
future. Tomorrow we are the Film 3 space
hosted by Chris Hackett. He lets me hop on as the Co host
to hang out and talk a little bit.

(00:46):
We will be discussing AI and aesthetics, which I think in a
roundabout sort of ways about art.
Not necessarily that there's an aesthetic movement linked to AI,
but that certain outputs or combinations of outputs begin to

(01:18):
have an aesthetic that exemplifies the fact that they
were created by AI. Who knows?
You know, I don't know. I don't have the notes we'll see
tomorrow on the actual chat. I don't know what notes he has,
so I'll probably just chime in wherever I have some thoughts

(01:42):
and we'll kind of guide the discussion as he typically does,
which is good. Additionally, Anunnaki been out
all summer. It's up on streaming and the
ebook and audiobook are out there.
Check it out if you haven't yet.Also, every other month this

(02:05):
year I have been putting out onedaily historical fact video.
These are composed of public domain images in many cases and
others, my own photography that I've collected over the years of
locations and different things set into motion by AI.

(02:30):
Here we are back on that topic again.
And then kind of composited together like a motion collage
with a little bit of informationand notable history layered over
in the voice over bringing it tolife.
This month is September, obviously, so thirty of those

(02:53):
for this month, and then we'll be back to it in November when I
release the actual book coming out as a hardback.
I have been proofing through themanuscript, making final little
changes and additions to that. I am going to begin working on
the cover design, which I think is going to be a little bit of a

(03:16):
mess. You know who knows We'll see
maybe AI can help me with that even I will see how it goes.
I'll I'll do my best with it andyou know, ideally it's good and
you know, everybody's happy and satisfied with my design

(03:37):
capacity, which is lacklustre. You know, let's be honest here.
I know we're my skills don't lieand design graphics is not one
of them. So I feel like taking advantage
of AI in some way is is probablygoing to be the the smart choice
to smooth things out there a little bit.

(04:08):
This month's ebook and audiobookrelease is Love, Death and
Explosives, Thomas Pensions Polypsychology, a long form
essay I've been putting togethersince the spring and finally
released at the beginning of this month.
It is now, since our episode 2 weeks ago being published to

(04:30):
audiobook platforms, it has beengetting picked up by Google and
Apple, Kobo, Nook, a few others.You know, some of the, I don't
know, darker alleys of audiobooklistenership.
It's not on Audible yet, has notpassed their QC quite yet.

(04:54):
I assume next week it will in the middle of the week.
I figure maybe Wednesday or Thursday at the latest would be
my guess. Maybe.
Maybe it'll happen by the end ofthis week.
It's not long. They could push it through, they
could listen to it and you know,let it let it out there into the

(05:16):
world that is only, it's just under an hour.
I think maybe it's like 53 minutes or something.
It's not a long listen. It's not a long ebook, you know,
So that's something to consider as well.
You can basically hammer throughit in probably 30 minutes on
your own if you were to use yourown eyes to read it instead of

(05:39):
my recording. I do think, having done 1
audiobook a month this year, that there's some interesting
things I've kind of learned fromthat.
And as much as I gripe about audiobook editing, maybe I've

(06:01):
gotten a little better at it. I have been going back and
listening to some of my earlier releases because of repackaging
some of the stuff from exploringour national parks and that has
given me an opportunity to evaluate the quality of some of

(06:22):
that audio. The 1st 2 audio books I did, I
think I was still using a condenser microphone to do it
with. And you know, while it's not bad
or horrible, I think I've kind of streamlined things once I've
moved over to a dynamic mic and kind of dialed in EQ and things

(06:47):
like that. You know, repeatedly using this
stuff, you're able to find the maybe a sweet spot.
I don't know, I don't want to say I'm good at it, just that
I've done it enough times to hopefully eliminate some of the

(07:09):
worse habits, the bad habits and, and, and get it sounding a
little, a little better. That said, you know, playing
music and recording music, I hadused condenser mics a lot for
vocals and stuff like that. And I, you know, obviously use
them for those earlier books, but I just find that the amount

(07:34):
of work you have to do when you're basically doing gorilla
production, not necessarily in alegit studio setup or anything
like that for music, is that there were so many incidental
little noises, you know, from the building or the environment

(07:57):
or, you know, your own self, that getting that track cleaned
up with so much work that it made it really arduous to end up
with the final result. And to be able to do, as I said

(08:19):
earlier in an audio book once a month this year, I, I, it
probably would have been just a insurmountable feat because of
how much work would have been required to do that.
Switching over to the dynamic, you can be, you can rely on

(08:40):
noise gate a little bit more reliably.
I think the EQ, while you lose some of the highs, you also get
a very sort of radio friendly sort of equalization range out

(09:00):
of the dynamic mic most people are generally familiar with.
So that is something that I'm considering more of as I go into
doing the audio book for the daily historical Facts.
I'm going to be, I'm going to begin tracking that this month

(09:23):
before the end of the month, andthen hopefully take my time
editing through October so that I can get that submitted and
release it in November. I think that that'll be a good
production schedule to pace myself and not feel crunched and
under the the gun basically likeI did for the pension essay,

(09:43):
which was late. I, my voice kind of, I had
allergies and I didn't want to record and you can hear
something is a little off in there.
I can at least maybe, maybe you can't, I don't know.
Maybe you don't listen to my voice enough yet.

(10:05):
And it's not bad, you know, if Ihad thought it was bad, I would
have waited another day or two to record, but I, I felt like it
was all right. I I did notice though, I had to
retrack maybe let's say half a dozen lines or whatever for
incident noise or mistakes or whatever that I caught along the

(10:26):
way. And it was a little tougher to
match my voice just because, youknow, some of the sinus
congestion creates a tonal quality to your voice that is
difficult to replicate artificially.

(10:50):
And that's how that goes. The session from 2 weeks ago is
up on podcast platforms. Relatively short one as this one
may in fact end up being as well.
And that's OK. We don't mind short sessions
just to put something out there and get some thoughts onto the

(11:14):
tape and out into the airwaves. It it's sort of a chance to to
think out loud and get ideas outof the head.
And I've been doing that in a similar way with a couple of
writing projects I have been doing, one of which is a short

(11:37):
story I'll put out next spring. I have the, I have the whole
story outlined. And I've probably talked about
this a little bit here and there, but what I'm doing is
basically speaking the conversion of the outline out

(12:02):
loud, speech to text and having my phone write down what I'm
saying. And sometimes I do a little bit
of the dialogue. Most of it is just pros and sort
of like world building and stufflike that.
But it's, it's not any faster than typing.
I could say that, but it's a, it's a different exercise, maybe

(12:25):
a little bit of the oral tradition.
That's what we would say. Good.
A good exercise, I think, and a challenging 1.
Because of that. I and I'm, I'm taking my time.
I thought I'd be a little bit further with this.
I wanted to have an alpha draft of this done, meaning basically
one run through of the entire outline from the beginning of

(12:46):
the story to the end in place bythis month.
You know, I'm a little behind onthat.
It goes that way. I think I can catch up with it
in little bits. Certainly be done with that, you
know, as soon as I can because I'm interested in getting my

(13:07):
mind kind of re immersed into that story.
I thought I'd have more time andI just have not.
That's OK. You know, been turning out a lot
of other stuff is so long as I get that short story out by say
may you know, that'll be fine. I'll be happy with that.

(13:30):
Target word count for that is about 6000, so I'm at about 10%
right now. I figure I'll be somewhere
between 25% and a third of the word count that I need when I
finish this Alpha pass. And then and then I'll start to

(13:58):
kind of flesh out more of the dialogue and a little bit more
of the particular world building.
I've done a lot of research. I haven't necessarily inserted
all of that stuff into there. I like to go for walks and I
think about this stuff and I'll put notes down.
That's kind of how I built out the the character designs and

(14:21):
the world in general and the factions and the outline for
this story. In fact, the stuff will just
kind of like pop up in my mind while I'm walking and I'm not in
a rush, you know, I'm not in a hurry.
I'm not a prolific word count writer, you know, very fairly

(14:42):
limited in that regard. But I like, I like the story.
I'm happy to tell the story and to kind of pace it out.
I'm not in a hurry for it. There's other things I want to
do. I really want to get back into
video next year. I've been sitting on Volume 3 of

(15:02):
the National parks videos for since the beginning of this
year. I have not touched them.
Unfortunately made no progress on that project since January I
think. So as soon as I finish the last
audiobook release for this year,I am going to shift gears and

(15:24):
get into that, you know, return to that and basically try to get
all of that complete and released in Q1 of 2026.
You know, I'm just shooting for as broad of streaming
distribution on that as I can and then we'll see.

(15:45):
You know, I think I've gotten better at creating video for
streaming distribution over the years.
Maybe I haven't, I don't know, We'll see.
I've had things rejected, I've had things picked up.
You know, I am a nobody in the grand scheme of that community.

(16:06):
So anytime I find any amount of success with it, it is cool with
me. Now returning to writing, I've
been doing a little experiment over the last couple of weeks.
I have been producing an audio story, strictly audio.

(16:27):
Now, I've been using AI to do this.
I will create an outline and then I'll feed the outline to an
LLM and it will spit out a bunchof stuff to me.

(16:49):
Some of it's good, some of it's not.
Sometimes I'll say, hey, change this, change that.
Other times I'll just take what it gives me and then RIP through
that and, you know, manually make all the changes that I
want. And then I do a reading of it.
I do a a vocal performance and Irecord it and then I export that

(17:13):
and I send it off to one person.It's a cool and fun experiment
in storytelling and design and production, narrative fiction,
whatever you want to kind of lump into the basket, broadly

(17:36):
and generally and specifically. The thing with it there too, is
I don't sit and like ruminate onit.

(17:57):
I'm not doing any research. I'm just just spitballing an
outline, having it give me whatever it does.
I make one Passover, the editorial to clean up some of
the language or remove some of the, I don't know, cliche stuff

(18:17):
or the superfluous little phrases and things so that it
reads a little bit more natural.Sometimes when I'm reading it on
the screen, I'm like, this is AIand it doesn't feel, doesn't

(18:39):
feel right. So, you know, it is what it is,
but I think that that's like a really organic way of generating
a story. Could I see something else kind
of coming out of that, maybe doing another sort of run

(19:01):
through of that story and reallykind of bulking it up maybe.
You know, I don't want to say yes.
I don't want to say no to it. I think it works because of the
reading performance. Strictly, I think if it was
printed and published the way itis, when I'm reading it, it

(19:23):
reads very much like some of the, I don't know, commercial
schlocky sort of fiction that's out there.
And it's fine if you're looking just for stuff to read or a

(19:48):
particular, you know, vein of storytelling or whatever
scenario, it's fine. It it does that.
It doesn't 100% sound like my voice.
I haven't built in any of my material for it to lean on yet.
I do intend to do that, but the.Where it comes to life is in the

(20:16):
reading, and I'm not saying thatI'm giving it a a a great
theatrical treatment or anything, I'm just saying that
it feels more natural verbalizedthan it does on the page.
Interesting to note. Let's see, what else do we have?

(20:41):
Oh also, as you may or may not know, I put out one article for
writers a month on sub stack. This month's was it was on
editing and revising. And here here I was just talking
about how I'm not doing much editing or revising and then

(21:02):
just ripping a a vocal read of astory and shipping it.
But. You should edit, you should
revise. I like to do a lot of that kind
of in the flow of things and to get back to a little bit of

(21:23):
audio book editing and revisionswhile I was editing the pension
thing because it is just really articulate.
It's very articulated words and phrases and sentences kind of
throughout that need to be, you know, in my opinion, performed a

(21:48):
certain way, but also spoken properly.
There's some $20 terms in there sprinkled throughout.
What I was finding is that if I was editing and then sequencing,
that was really slowing me down.What I ended up doing about the

(22:11):
halfway through is I just was like, I got to stop sequencing.
I'm just going to edit. Just going to RIP through the
entire rest of the audio and grab up all the lines that I
want and then I will sequence after.
No, I'm not saying that I saved myself time.
I don't know. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't.

(22:32):
It just was a lot of back and forth for the first half between
editing and then sequencing the timing of the phrases and lines
or cutting things up and kind ofmoving from very wide segments

(22:52):
to then very narrow segments. And when I was just kind of
going wide and letting it RIP and moving along, I was able to
process it more rapidly. The entire thing I recorded on a

(23:13):
Friday and then I had it submitted by Wednesday night.
I think, you know, I did this session.
It was about 2 1/2 hours to record.
And then I would guess I probably spent, I don't know, I,

(23:38):
I guess maybe 7-8, maybe 10 hours editing it.
That sounds about right. I guess I would say, you know
that editing for me takes like 3to 4 times as much time.
You basically have to listen to the entire thing at least once

(24:01):
all the way through many, many times.
You are really you're you're re listening to segments numerous
times to compare which take was the best one.
Maybe you did 5 takes. You narrow it down to two or
three. Well, then you kind of like
process of elimination trying toget it down to one or if you're

(24:23):
like, I like the beginning of this one.
I like the ending of that one. I'm going to put them together.
Yeah, that's just kind of how itgoes with that stuff.
You know, you do what you got todo for it as it is for today,

(24:46):
you know, let's let's call it for today.
I've got everything off my mind since 2 weeks ago and you know
the sumo tournaments on. We don't want to distract away
from all the daily action. You can catch on NHK World via

(25:06):
your Roku or Internet service provider.
Check it out. I'm a day behind.
Last time I saw it was it was still a a tie at the top between
the two Yokozuna. We'll see how it goes over the

(25:28):
course. We got to catch up and today is
day 4, you know, so it very wellmight be a completely different
scenario by now. At any rate, you've been a joy,
and we will talk again before too long.