I decided to expand on the ideas in the book that I wrote from this blog. I had thought a theatre piece was next but it turned out podcasting was the next expansion and here it is. It’s serialized and meant to be heard sequentially. There are two episodes so far, each about 15 minutes long. I plan to launch an episode every two weeks.

If you are curious as to how they turned out you can connect below or click the podcasting button at the top of the page. Your listening and feedback would be much appreciated.

http://itsabsurdtobeawomanonplanetearthetc.com/

 How it all happened.

 After some research I bought a blue-yeti mike, a mike stand and a mike cover.  That cost about 150 dollars and my husband had a mike stand. It’s important for sound quality to have the mike suspended as otherwise it will pick up noise from your desk and probably computer. I got advice from my brother-in-law John who podcasts and led me to some tutorials and helped with the initial sorting out which turned out to be quite horrible.

I had decided at the same time to rebuild my old website which was floating in the ethers since mobile me stopped operating at the same time I lost my website info on a computer transfer years ago. This created much confusion and the help person on my hosting site would tell me one things and it would screw things up and then tech help at GoDaddy where my domain was would tell me something else. It makes for a very terrible feeling in the brain to sit there hour after hour hitting dead ends and not being able to find that one little thing that is particular to your situation that will enable you to be up and running technically.

Once I was done reclaiming my website, I built my site in an hour and was then able to dive right into podcasting hell where Dean, who was my tech support on wordpress.com actually called me brave, so I must have sounded like I had scrambled brains even on ichat. The trouble with tutorials and people as well is that it is likely that your situation is unique somehow and one missing piece will lock you out of forward progress.

I recorded on the Audacity program which was free and very simple. It took a very few tests to settle on mike volume and how far to be from the mike. Then I sent my files to Patric Caird and we spent about 90 minutes a day for four days adding music and sound effects. It went fairly smoothly and we found that more often than not  the music we pulled from his library would fit perfectly with the dialogue. In each episode there was one place that became a boondoggle and took up the whole ninety minute session. He has a sound effects library as well and we added those as we went along.

Putting it up on itunes was another bit of hell. I couldn’t even find someone to pay to come over and help me get my first one up on itunes. Thanks to Sophie who sat with me through a lot of the frustration, and though she is tech savy was stymied by my particular roadblock. Finally it was solved with Patric figuring out the final piece once my hosting site problem was solved.

I ended up going to my naturalpath doctor who told me my corpus callosum had crashed under the stress! That’s the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres and a crash basically means your hormones start firing improperly and you feel super crappy. He set me right and am back on track. It took a village! Thank you village.

Once you know how to do something it’s embarrassingly easy. Now I have other problems to solve like adding descriptions and pics to each individual episode and understanding how to spread the word.

Onward.