Making space for more
The cat is telling me that I’m in the wrong writing space. She came and yelled at me first thing to inform me she wasn’t impressed with the change of venue.
The little dog, however, has taken up the watch, perched at my feet on the futon that fills up one entire end of the room, totally unaware that a foam tile is slowly peeling off the ceiling and likely to fall on her head at any minute.
Welcome to the first morning in my new office/sound studio. It is a far cry from the dream office that I saw in the first house we ever looked at. That one had a window seat, built in bookshelves and a working fireplace.
This one doesn’t even have a window, which makes it kind of ideal for its current purpose.
One of the many quirks of our house is it’s complete lack of closets in the upstairs bedrooms. Instead, the builders made this weird windowless room at the end of the hall as a kind of double walk-in closet. While for some people this may have been the dream, my husband and I spent a considerable amount of our first walk-through debating better uses for the space. My childhood friend deemed it an ideal recording studio at first glance.
It took almost four years and some gentle nudging from friends for me to be able to justify the conversion, but over the last few months the room has been transformed from a catch all space, to a soothing blue oasis for writing and recording. It needs more foam, and better sticky tape to keep it all from falling on the little dog, but the converted closet is still bigger than my childhood bedroom, features a couple different places to write, and had its first recording session yesterday. That same childhood friend needed to record some harmony tracks for one of her songs and was able to put the new equipment through its paces. So far so good.
This will be the space where I take my first tentative steps into voice over work. I’ve only recently started telling people that this will be a part of the next chapter for me, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised that most people think it makes perfect sense. I hope they’re right. I find it oddly outside of my comfort zone given that I’ve been acting since I was 16, and presenting material in a vocally interesting way is a pretty major part of being an educator. This should feel more comfortable. I think I’m mic shy.
I’ve no idea where this road will lead, but the creation of this space feels like the right first step. As I make friends with the space and with the new equipment, maybe I’ll even follow WordPress’ urging to turn my blog posts into a podcast. Maybe.
In the meantime it seems like a good place to keep finding my voice.
Podcasts are handy when hands are busy, but words on a page will always hold magic for me.
No worries. I think best by writing so anything I would podcast would start out in written form.