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  • "OK, you ready?”

  • Yeah.

  • I was raised to be Generic.

  • Born that way.

  • But on the third day in the second quarter, I'm starting to think it's not

  • who I really am.

  • The moods they don't understand just yet.

  • Usually it's to help sell things.

  • But sometimes you glimpse a person in that reflective surface,

  • who seems a little bit like you.

  • My name is Suzy Jackson, and I am a narrator of audiobooks.

  • Is that what we call ourselves?

  • I'm like, I don't knowaudio...

  • voiceover artist?

  • I mean, but like we're talking about audiobooks, so...

  • As I'm reading, any time a character pops up, I'll underline their name.

  • "Very good," Dr. Snoot says. I didn't notice her behind me.

  • She feels like a grandmother — I don't have one, but

  • I've read about them in books. "Onto the next one."

  • One trick that I'll do, I'm trying to find if I have a place... Here.

  • Let's say there's a sentence that saysshe whisperedat the end.

  • So I need to know that before I start.

  • So I'll underline it while I'm preparing the book.

  • See, I'll draw an arrow to it.

  • And so then I'll catch it before I'm saying it.

  • So there's... It's this weird mental trick of staying really present, but also kind of also reading

  • a little bit ahead.

  • After Dr. Snoot walks away, I fall into a daze until Kenneth hits me on the shoulder,

  • Rita and Adelaide bouncing next to him.

  • "Addison," he says, sniffing a little and pushing his hair behind his ears.

  • "Do you want to go look at it again?" "I'm supposed to work.

  • I have thirteen cases to diagnose before break four."

  • Rita grabs me by the shoulders. "Come on daydreamer, let's go."

  • I start to follow them, Adelaide chattering the entire time.

  • [GURGLING NOISE]

  • Did you hear... [laughs] so that's what happens.

  • You're like, and now my esophagus made some strange bubbling sound,

  • so we stop and pick up.

  • And he started hitting a vending machine and I realized — I knew him when I was five!

  • Before they made me an operator.

  • "He ate a lot of glue."

  • She'd keep going, but we stop. Standing in front of us, we see it.

  • A funny drawing scrawled on the wall.

  • I wrote down the characters in the book, and I noted on my paper what I knew about them:

  • that Dr. Snoot was like a grandma, that Kenneth was nerdy, that Rita was always in control,

  • that Adelaide was feisty.

  • I felt like I knew the energy of it.

  • It saysKilroy Was Hereunderneath.

  • And then underneath that, there's another word.

  • "Vox?" Kenneth says, his voice catching on the x.

  • hours on end, like that stamina is more difficult than coming up with slight variation

  • of vocal quality to distinguish characters.

  • Whether I'm reading aloud to kids or whether I'm reading on my own, the experience has

  • changed a bit since I've been narrating.

  • You aren't necessarily only going to be narrating the style or genre of books that you

  • yourself might choose to read on your own.

  • So I think there is something to just respecting

  • that story and respecting the audience for that story.

  • Voice,” I tell the group again.

  • The one thing that can never be generic.”

  • I don't know if I've done alien voices, but I've done in the sci-fi world a lot

  • of creatures.

  • Can you do a pizza order as a dragon?”

  • “I'll take a large cheese with extra pepperoni.”

  • It's so weird, it's so weird what I do.

  • I'm frightened.

"OK, you ready?”

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