Your Best Isn't Good Enough Until It Is... And then You Dance

Thriller was inspirational on so many levels.

You like that title? I also thought about naming this, “Ambition, Failure, Perseverance, Success.” You don’t have to be a writer to understand this cycle. All humans face this cycle. For some, step two, “failure,” is why life isn’t worth striving for greater than status quo. I’m more on the opposite end of that spectrum; my life is consumed with striving to overcome status quo. I have ADHD for opportunity same as dogs have ADHD for squirrels. So, when one of my favorite podcasts, Tales to Terrify, issued a call for narrators, I thought I’d give it a try.

What followed was a much more difficult experience than I anticipated, and it almost broke me. Did you notice the end of my title? There is good news, but not yet. What followed was a mental and emotional beating from step two that I can’t remember feeling to such a bleak degree. I felt similar to Johnny Damon, who came out of retirement after the season had already started, and has been working his tail off to prove he can play the sport he loves at a professional level. He is currently batting .215 for my Indians, which in Major League Baseball standards is grounds for being demoted. I empathize with him because I gave narrating my all, and I still found myself in a place where giving up seemed the only option other than forking over a few hundred dollars to create or rent a sound studio.

I don’t want to completely copy what I say in the below video, but that is the backbone of my recent experience. I’m not sure what I learned aside from focusing more on step three, “perseverance,” than step two. I reached out to pros and did my best to keep trying new methods until I created a sound studio where I could replicate a uniform production needed to record and drop in replacements for my mistakes.

Now, without further ado, in a semi-response to Diane Graham and Keven Newsome‘s Dance Off! White and Nerdy challenge, I celebrate the victory of step four, “Success.”

My week over at Timothy C. Ward Headquarters:
Book Review: Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry (Joe Ledger #1)
AudioTim 39: Jeffrey B. Burton, Author of The Chessman
Pulling Out from Character’s Point of View: A Question on POV Preference
Love vs. Consequence (And the Quirkiness In Between)
(wow, and that doesn’t even mention what fiction I wrote that week…phew)

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