QUITTING, TOURIST DEATHS, AND DRUG POSSESSION FOR SALE - 032

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, quitting, tourist deaths, and drug possession for sale. I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau. This is episode number 32 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality, crime-related fiction. I want to thank Gold Shield patron Deborah Dunbar, from deborahdunbar.com and Coffee Club patrons: Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, Kate Wagner, Marco Carocari, Victoria Kazarian, and Rebecca Jackson. Your support keeps this podcast going, so please support all of these amazing authors by visiting their author websites and reading their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes at writersdetective.com/32. If you have your own author business, you should be getting patrons yourself, so consider joining Patreon. It's free for you, and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro-payments, so give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more. Visit writersdetective.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

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I want to talk to you about quitting. Contrary to every sporting goods advertisement and pep talk you've ever heard, quitting is an option. A few episodes ago I talked about how I went back to school full-time while working as a detective, and then when I graduated, I had a whole lot of free time, or at least it seemed that way after such a crushing schedule. Back then I decided to pursue something that I thought would be fun to kind of fill that time. I somehow found myself going down this internet rabbit hole, where I found a course called "Adventures In Voice Acting," and it was taught by Tony Oliver. Tony was the voice of Rick Hunter in the 1980s anime series, Robotech, which I have to admit, I definitely watched as a kid. This class was held at a real-life working voiceover studio in Burbank, California.

We, this class of outsiders interested in this world of animation voiceover, got a chance to record ourselves reading dialogue that was translated from Japanese into English, and it was ... We were doing this while trying to match the action, the tone, and the timing of the Japanese anime video, the cartoon playing on the screen in front of us, and everyone in this class, I should mention, was brand new to this. It was an absolute blast. It was just the kind of like little kid kind of fun I was looking for, after finishing at the university, and it was ... I guess it was like a field trip to the center of the anime universe, or at least that's how it felt, and I really wanted to play. I wanted to voice a cartoon character, or a video game character, something fun that had nothing to do with my day job.

I did get a chance to do a few little gigs here and there, but I really did want to give this a shot. I kind of combined the two, this voiceover thing and my work. I was working an undercover assignment at the time, so I took this new interest of mine, and signed up to attend a voiceover convention using my undercover name, and I joined several hundred other wannabe and established voiceover artists at this convention. I learned a ton, and it also helped to cement my online undercover persona a little bit by instantly having a hundred and something real Facebook friends a week after the convention, so there was an added bonus there. But at this convention, I actually met one of the top voiceover coaches in the country, and shortly thereafter I became one of her students. She is a no nonsense coach, and she is not there to coddle you or stroke your ego.

​She was all about transforming her students into working professional voiceover talent, that routinely booked high paying national advertisement spots, and her name is Nancy Wolfson. In my opinion, she is the absolute best in the business, and to this day I'll hear advertisements that I know were done by one of Nancy's students, just by the way that they read the ad copy, because they're just perfect. Nancy has an incredibly smart design to her curriculum and she doesn't want you messing up the foundational building blocks of these lessons by taking outside courses while you're in her program. But, of course, a new friend that I met at that voiceover conference invited me to a cartoon voiceover class at another voiceover studio. I was the only newbie in the room, and this class, was taught by the Emmy Award winner, Charlie Adler. If you watched any cartoons in the 1980s, you definitely heard Charlie Adler's voice, and helping run this class was the late Carol Anne Suzy.

She was a little firecracker of a woman that you would likely know as the voice of Mrs. Wolowitz, the unseen mother of Howard Wolowitz, on The Big Bang Theory...                                                                                                                                                                               

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