Paul Heitsch on Narrating House of Blades

You’ve been Josh Dalzelle’s narrator since Omega Rising in 2014, across something like thirty-plus books. What’s it like opening a manuscript for a world he’s building from scratch, versus stepping back into Jason Burke’s boots?

It’s exciting. Joshua has built rich, highly detailed worlds for his Black Fleet and Omega Force series’, and populated them with dozens of distinctive characters, so I really looked forward to the prospect of delving into an entirely new world with its own cast.

Was there a moment reading House of Blades where you thought, “okay, this is a different Josh”? What tipped you off?

Right off the bat, the setting was very different from the current-day (more or less) Earth-bound Military Space-opera world of Omega Force. House of Blades is set in something more like a distant future fantasy version of feudal Japan. The storytelling, with the political intrigue and tactical maneuvering of the various protagonists and antagonists, is very recognizably Josh, but the Imperium of Light, with its complex societal structures and history, is an entirely different kind of world. 

And the story centers around Adran, whose speech is much more formal than any of the characters in the OF cast, where even the battlesynths have their own versions of snark and sarcasm. So those were two striking differences that told me I was in for a very different kind of ride. 

How much do you two actually talk before you record — is there a call, a pronunciation doc, notes in the margins? Or do you go in cold and read it like any other reader would?

Joshua sends me a beta copy of the manuscript, and I will occasionally ask him about a pronunciation, or about anything I’m not clear on. That’s unique to Joshua, and is something that’s emerged over the course of working with him on over 25 books so far. Otherwise, my process is the same as any other book. 

Adran is a man trained since childhood to suppress everything he feels. How do you perform that kind of restraint without it landing flat on the ear?

Well, the restraint is part of him, not the whole person. So I play him as a person who happens to have gone through that training, and has internalized it very deeply, but is not defined by it. And the way he’s written gives me a lot of openings for his underlying humanity seep through. One of the things I really appreciate is how good Joshua is at creating fully-formed characters, and then allowing them to change and grow. I’m looking forward to how he does that with Adran and the other characters introduced in the first book.

Tradus, Thuna, Eado, Luminarch, Osterias, Seryth. Who wins the argument on pronunciation, and has an author ever overruled you on one?

For the Omega Force books, Joshua seems happy to let me figure out my own pronunciations, but for House of Blades, I specifically asked for pronunciations. If there’s ever a dispute, the author always wins, and for books that take place in an imaginary world, I’ll typically ask for pronunciations. This didn’t happen with House of Blades, but sometimes an author will give me a pronunciation that is different enough from how I hear it based on the spelling, that I’ll do a search-and-replace run through the manuscript to change the word to a spelling that’s more intuitive for me so I don’t ever inadvertently change how I pronounce it. 

Give people the real numbers: how many hours in the booth per finished hour of audio, and what does a bad recording day actually look like?

I’ll spend two to two and a half hours in the booth to record one hour of audio. I’ll also spend time in the booth doing other things, some of them work and some just goofing off/procrastinating. A bad day in the booth is usually the result of either me being really bad at staying on task, or me struggling to stay connected to the story because i’m tired or distracted by something else going on in my life, or me just not liking the book very much.

Across eighteen Omega Force books — how do you remember what a character sounded like three years later? Is there a literal file somewhere?

I save – literally – everything from every book I’ve ever worked on. So there’s always a hard drive, somewhere, where I have the earlier books from a series archived, and can excavate them to hear how I voiced a character. Years ago I got in the habit of saving a clip of dialogue from every character in a book, and placing them on a Characters track in that session (I use Pro Tools). That way I can refer to them immediately whenever I need to. If the book is part of a series, that Characters track gets migrated to the session for every subsequent book in the series, and new characters get added to it as they appear. 

What were you doing before the booth, and what was the first book that made you think this could actually be the job?

I’ve been a musician most of my life (I started training as a classical pianist when I was four, and began playing professionally when I was 18). I started composing and sound designing for games in the ’90’s, which is how I learned recording engineering, and it also gave me the opportunity to engineer and direct thousands of spoken word recordings. I’d been a huge fan of audiobooks since the ’80’s, and had toyed with the idea of trying it myself, but never actually attempted it until 2011.

There’s a TLDR version of this story, but the short version is I was applying for a Production Manager job with ACX, which is Amazon’s platform for indie authors and narrators to hook up, and decided to create a narrator profile and audition for a couple of books while I was at it. I didn’t get the PM job, but I did get an offer to produce one of the books I submitted for, (mostly, I think, on the strength of the technical quality of my audition — I’ve learned the acting part on the job). For a couple of years it was something I did very part-time, and then in 2013 I got tapped for a title, The Game Player by Rafael Yglesias, for which I knew there had been something like 400 people auditioning. That’s when it occurred to me that this might actually be something I could do for a living. It also qualified me for joining SAG-AFTRA, and that was another big step toward becoming a full-time narrator.  

Do you still listen to audiobooks for pleasure, or has doing it professionally ruined that? Any recommendations for readers/listeners?

I listen to audiobooks all the time for both personal pleasure and professional development. I am more keenly aware of technical flaws, now, but those are pretty rare for anything from an established publisher, and I have several go-to narrators who I know will give a first-rate performance. If you want to hear a master class in fully committing to every word in a story, listen to Finty Williams’ performance of The Girl With All The Gifts.