I’ve Been on This Planet 40 Years and All I Got Was This Ridiculous Insight

Today, the Write Way Café welcomes Samantha Anne, a Crimson Romance author and new entrepreneur in audio books, who is moving on and up.

As I enter my 40th year – some days feeling like it’s my 20th, some days feeling like it’s my 60th – I’m compelled, like many, to take stock of where I was, where I’m at/who I am, and where/who I want to be. Have the years before been rough? What did I do about it, how did I live as a result; were my conflicts truly closed? Am I still living in the past? Am I even ready for the future? I mean, it sounds like the standard mid-life crisis, yeah? It could be worse, I suppose – I could be running around throwing my disposable dollars (disposable? Hah!) in the g-string of one of the La Bare boys in Dallas or buying an over-priced car and haphazardly traveling the world photographing and writing and… wait, how’s that worse?

The good news is that, since moving to Texas last year, my life has changed. Gone are the days where I spent most of my time underground, contending with crowds of people who’ve forgotten to brush their teeth or have no concept of how much excess space they actually take up (lookin’ at you, manspreaders), running from work to home and home to band practice and from there to a show or the studio. I’m no longer really harried or in a rush; New York City’s fast-paced hypnotic influence isn’t exactly there anymore. Have I been busy planting roots into the Texas soil and even, in some cases, struggling to fit in? Sure. But the reality is, life slows down when you leave the city. There’s a lot more time to – well, see stuff. And I can safely say that I spent my final year as a thirty-something blessed because of the opportunity I’ve had to open my eyes and get a good look at the people and things around me, both in and out of my body of work. Admittedly, I enjoy seeing evolution – gradual development of anything for the better of groups of people as a whole. And while you and I both know, reader, that some things in this world have de-evolved, I’d like to touch on the evolution of books as it pertains to (oddly enough) sound.

I couldn’t tell you why I railed against audio books for as long as I did; I can only say that, in my mind, books were as perfect a medium as they could be – and why would anyone want to change that? But as I gradually accepted e-books, including joining the ranks of writers who would take full advantage of the ease of self-publishing in this form over the last few years, it hit me pretty hard that I couldn’t ignore the birth and growth of the audiobook. A lot of thought went into this, believe me – I ultimately decided that, for all the people who wanted to read a book but (for whatever reason, and there are a few) couldn’t, putting my support behind the audiobook was the right thing to do.

It occurred to me that I should have been behind the audiobook as soon as it hit the market! As a pre-teen, I loved writing angsty and puppy love-riddled stories that my friends called Daydreams. And the thing is, they were all focused on reading school things – they didn’t want to read any of my stories, no matter how interesting it was or how much it involved them! What they wanted, however, was for me to narrate – and narrate I did, adding flourishes and accents that can’t be seen on paper and can only be properly interpreted by a story’s author. I cannot count the number of amazing sleepovers we had, staying up way too late while I sat with a five subject notebook filled with chapters about us and our favorite boy band members and read to them, gasping and giggling so loudly we often got busted.

And there it was – why wasn’t I doing this? I’ve also had a great speaking voice, and have had the ability to narrate a story just as well as I write one since I was a kid! A passion for the medium grew pretty quickly and, next thing I knew, I was setting up an audiobook production service, called D.D. Audiobooks (Day. Dream. Cute/Poetic, amirite?!) – designed as an affordable option for indie authors like myself to have a fairly affordable option to get their work onto ACX quickly. And I’m happy to say that, while I’ve been working on the novel to follow my 2015 release Company Ink, I’ve recently completed an audiobook, titled Snowbound, with the wonderful Lynn Crandall.


So, now that I’ve turned 40, what’s next? More of everything that makes me happy – books, movies, art… to create new things by way of new mediums would certainly be a great adventure!

But first, a glass of wine. *drops mic, picks up corkscrew*

Company Ink available at:

Amazon 

Barnes & Noble






Author Samantha Anne is a born and bred New Yorker, raised in the Soundview section of The Bronx. Her passions include writing, cooking, music, and an unbridled refusal to be categorized into one genre. 

www.samantha-anne.net