I think the best thing about being an audiobook producer is that you can work from home. This means that if you are feeling productive and your family is all off doing their school activities or work meetings, you can pop down to your studio and escape into a world you create for your audience for a couple of hours.

Then, when your voice gets tired, or you start to freeze because you’ve turned off the furnace so your sound floor is practically infinite, you can pop back upstairs for a cup of tea and some binge watching whilst you edit.

It’s a good life if you can get it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not making me a living yet. I’d love to get royalties on a fantastically successful series that gives me a passive income that I can live off! Right now, it’s a combination of “per finished hour” and royalty share from books on sale through iTunes and Audible. I am averaging one new novel a month, so I’m feeling productive, if not independent yet!

Another wonderful thing about audiobook producing is that it fits so neatly around the other million things I do as a professional actor and mother of a professional actor. Things I need to do to keep finding work: audition prep, driving into the city to the audition, self-taping auditions, updating resumes and websites and YouTube, networking, classes, SLIXER events, to name a few. True, sometimes the work of finding work takes too much of a front seat and then I find myself with 8hr editing days to try to meet my production deadline (which is dizzying, disorienting and deadly–hence the term “deadline”). Balance is key.

So having Spring Break as a staycation this year when our trip to Hawaii got cancelled is turning out to be an exercise in balance for my whole family. We are planning some at-home activity, visiting whatever businesses we can safely buy things from (grocery store, take-out, hobby store where we let the proprietor handle all our purchases), and trying not to grieve for too long over cancelled or suspended projects that we had booked.

Thankfully the weather where we are has been extremely co-operative and we’ve developed a very nice catio for my son and his cat Piper on our balcony!

Best wishes for a healthy spring. ❤️