Chapter 8 - the Absence of work.

So time flies when no roles show up. Sometimes that happens, and in a small market like Kansas City, even with an in house voice over studio at my daytime job. Then before you know it, months have flown by, because thankfully I had enough other stuff to keep me insanely busy, and I didn't have much time to reflect on not having any voice work come my way.

Now to be fair, externally, I'd not been auditioning, much less looking to see if anything was even available. I think because I needed to get some other things aligned professionally, I tried to look for a way to utilize my fledgling skills at voice over, and produce something that could benefit me creatively, and perhaps round out my website entries and updates, while allowing me to keep in practice and learn how to use audio editing software and equipment even better, while I wait for more opportunities to present themselves, or I decide to pursue them more diligently.

So, after spending a lot of time listening to the radio, especially Johnny Dare on 98,9 the Rock here in KC, and a whole heck of a lot of NPR, I came to the decision to make a radio program of sorts of my own. It took the form of a podcast published on Podbean (available on iTunes as well), that got me out of my creative acting block, and gave me a vocal outlet.

It's been an incredible amount of fun, and it's allowed me to do some opinion and inspirational bits, a few NPR flavored ones, and to re-record a demo song. Thankfully, a good number of people that follow my blogs also started listening, and I'm averaging a good number of listens per episode.

From a technical standpoint, it's begun to allow me a purpose to begin to develop my voice again for the microphone, to play with putting energy and emotion out there, which has steadily begun to be something more apparent and jubilant as the episodes progress.

From a creative standpoint, oh man, I set the standard that this was going to be a creative effort that ran the spectrum across my professional and hobby interests, with a bit of personal story telling thrown in. Some of this came about really from my newly found love of independent press publications in the form of Zines (which I cover in one episode), and the raw presentations they have.

But this has also become a wonderful compendium to my main site, www.theartisanrogue.com as well as the others, in that I'm able to produce radio quality broadcasts that are quick and timely, with average running times of about 14 minutes or less. And I get to cut loose and be even a little bit entertaining while doing them.

So in the meantime, while I work through a lot of art show preparation and try and adjust to the new challenges in my day job, and create new comics and books, I will keep adding to the podcast. Hopefully more of you will give it a listen, give me some feedback, and maybe even more topics to talk about or cover.

Here's the link for the Artisan Rogue Podcast!