As a podcaster I am always searching for a great story, I was galavanting through an antique store and found this book by Margaret Echard, based on a true story about her family, set in the 40s – the book, smelled good, it felt like it was SOMETHING more than paper and ink and it’s green hard cover texture. A collection of juicy secrets and skin tingling worthy words, a collection of mystery, deceit and intrigue. A good story has to have LOVE and DEATH (did you know this) I bought this book and within the cover there was an insignia ______
I tell stories for Audible as a side hustle, I know how to produce my voice for satiable listening ears..or so I’ve been told. I’m a project manager by day. I like the challenge of putting things together in a consolidated view, playing with files, organizing, planning, keeping people motivated. It’s the process I love.
My CAST knows the vibe I give, “please don’t give up on me now…”
I read the book, cover to cover, did some investigating on the people, places and history of the author and the book itself. I could only find one, 1 person who left a review about this book and he, it turns out is Canadian, and an actor…my idea was forming.
What if I made this book into an audio drama? What if I got a bunch of people who use their voice(s) to tell stories like podcasters and voice over artists, and actors…what if I did this?
Lots of ideas begin to ruminate, I carried the book with me, wrote copious amounts of notes, picked apart all of my favourite podcasts for their best tricks and tips and included those and some of my own from my over 100 episodes.
Lots of sleepless nights, late nights & early mornings.
I put out my feelers…leaned on my community of voice artists and the excitement was contagious which was sort of inline with the covid pandemic feel, a sense of connection to the world going through the pandemic together, ALONE, isolated.
We recorded this all REMOTE in our own homes, ALONE, I collected these clips and files, processed, processed some more, spliced, added music, mixed and mastered for hours, and days and minutes…
I asked for more from my CAST of 25, can you add this line, can someone play this on the piano, I had people drop out, other CASTs friends wanted to join, and their moms and their kid’s are involved, roommates, wife and husbands, friends of friends, even my husband got in on it when I needed titles read, miscellaneous lines added here and there.
It has to stay a secret, only this ^^ one guy knows the truth, the book name
Welcome to ProjectDF, it’s a mystery, it’s a side project that I am so proud of, it’s a collection of amazing talent from across this country of Canada, across the United States of America as well as into Australia..the talent runs far and wide.
If you’re still reading by this point, thank you for your support, thank you for listening and sharing and leaving comments. Thank you to Kylee and Rafe and London as my main characters who didn’t give up well over a year into this – it all paused, but they stuck with it and came through for me, for this…Project DF Podcast.
DISCLAIMER: Margaret Echard is the author of this book, copyright 1941 by DoubleDay Publishing House now owned by PenguinRandomhouse who only supports current authors, who checked all available resources and directories for literary rights agents and contacts and found nothing. We tried to track down heirs of Echards but to no avail. We reached out to the Indiana Library who houses the largest amount of articles of Margaret Echard and we searched extensively for the copyright holder(s) of the book to get permission to make the audiodrama but were unable to find them and if anyone has information about the copyright for the book or are the copyright holder, please reach out to me at Valerie@ValerieMoss.ca