Flash Fiction Fridays are Changing a Little.

Today's post will be a short one. I just wanted to let you all in on a change coming to Flash Fiction Fridays for the foreseeable future.

Neither do I, but it's not a bad one.

You might have noticed Friday's post did not include a link to an audio version of the story. That wasn't a mistake. The change I am talking about is dropping the addition of an audio version of the stories.

Why stop the audios?

To put it frankly, the audio versions of the stories take as long to do as writing the stories themselves, sometimes significantly longer. Although I enjoyed doing them, I quite simply do not have the time to cut, edit, and upload audio versions with a full-time job, running Contented Comfort, running this blog, handling half of my girls' homeschool classes, and trying to keep writing. Something had to give, so this is what I am cutting, at least for now.

Besides, after more than two full years without doing any sort of audio editing outside of trimming down or balancing out the levels of commercial files sent to me for uploading, I am beyond rusty. If I manage to find time here and there, I plan to work on mastering Soundboard for use in cutting audio versions of my existing books and others in the future.

One upside to having gone back to the radio cluster for a year or so, is the fact I reconnected with the Production Manager they have had for the past 30+ years. If both of us can manage some time, I hope to perhaps study voice acting and audio editing with him, which would increase the quality of anything I could do in that department considerably.

If only. I have a feeling it's going to take forever.

Teaching myself how to edit and layer audio was the main reason I had for cutting audio versions of the flash fictions in the first place. Two years on, I have improved, but I never managed to get as far along as I would have liked. This was probably due to barely having time before and rushing instead of taking time to learn the program properly.

So I would rather focus on what I can do well and study behind the scenes for a while. Besides, I have come to realized I am going to have to recut all of the audios I have now when I go to publish the collections anyway. Lessons learned and ideas and shifts going on in my head resulted in uneven portrayals over the course of each universe's progression that didn't become clear until I went back and listened to the playlists.