Hello, me again

I started a blog then immediately disappeared for a month, didn’t I? Oops. Well, I did say this may not be regular.

April was a very busy month. I got a haircut a couple of weeks ago and now I have a fringe, so that’s obviously the big news; but I guess I have been up to one or two other things as well.

Writing news

I’ve been busy working on my existing portfolio and have sent off a few scripts in response to various call outs – so please keep everything crossed for that! I’ve also been having regular meetings with a couple of my writer buddies with whom I’m working on a sketch show (can’t say much more than that for now but can promise that I will be saying LOTS about it in the not-too-distant future). One week we accidentally plotted out the first series of a sitcom. So, er, I guess keep an eye out for news of that too…?

I’ve also got a couple of new copywriting projects about to kick off, which I’m excited to get going on! Did I mention that I do copywriting, btw? Let me know if you need a hand with the text for your webpages, etc.

Voice news

I’ll be off to this year’s One Voice Conference in a few days, so I’ve been busy booking workshops, deciding which talks to go to, and trying to figure out how best to get to London on a train strike day. I’ll tell you all about it when I’m back – I might even remember to take some photos this year, have failed miserably on that front the past two…

I also had a long chat to the brilliant Mr Ted Huggins following my guest narration on his podcast earlier this year. Said chat will be available for you to listen to at some point soon, but if you want to listen to my episode in the meantime, you can find it here. My regular education reads have also been keeping me firmly out of trouble. One script featured two slightly perplexing recipes for “fruit salad”:

1) Two apples and one cup of yoghurt

2) Three oranges and two spoons of cheese

The main thing that I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks, however, is setting up a brand-new voice booth!

When I moved into my flat, I set up a temporary booth so I could carry on working while I got settled in. Although it was a little cramped, said temporary booth worked really well, so there was no particular hurry for me to get something more permanent set up and so I carried on using it while I focussed on other things, like replacing the camp chairs I was sitting on with an actual sofa.

Cut to 18 months later and the time had really come to set up a proper recording space as spending upwards of an hour a night in a dark, standing room only, well, glorified blanket fort* was getting a little wearing – regardless of how decent the sound I was producing from it was!

I had a little room which I thought would be perfect to set up in, however there was no power in it. I assumed that this would be an insurmountable problem, only to be remedied by running extension leads all over the shop; but I mentioned it to a friend who happens to be an electrician and it turned out that it wasn’t quite the problem I thought it would be – she came and wired in a socket for me which took her a grand total of about 20 minutes.

So for the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent every spare moment balancing on various bits of furniture sticking foam tiles to the walls and ceiling (which I sourced from one of my brilliant VO mates – thanks Mars!), and I now have a proper little booth with a light and a door and room to swing a modest sized cat.

I’ve already recorded a couple of jobs from it and, let me tell you, this is a whole different ball game. I have a lot of exciting projects in the pipeline so my new booth and I are going to be spending a lot of quality time together…

* I was always really good at making blanket forts when I was a kid and they said it was a skill I’d never use as an adult. Well, little did “they” know that I’d be paying my rent out of one someday!