Yesterday I wrote about the long road to finishing the audiobook edition of Surfing the Interstates — the gear, the specs, the four chapters with RMS and peak problems, the three-month abandonment, and Auphonic riding to the rescue. If you haven’t read that one, start there.
This is what happened next.
ACX has finally accepted all sixteen chapters. Then came the fine print: it will take up to two weeks before the audiobook goes live on Audible and Amazon.
Two weeks. I’m not good at waiting.
Here’s the thing I’d done right without fully realizing why — I hadn’t signed an exclusive contract with ACX. That decision, almost an afterthought when I was setting up the account, turned out to matter enormously. Non-exclusive distribution means ACX gets Amazon and Audible, but you keep the right to sell and distribute your audiobook anywhere else you like. Simultaneously. Right now.
So that’s exactly what I did.
The audiobook is now embedded directly into each chapter post here on Substack — read and listen at the same time, or just hit play and let it wash over you. It’s in my Ko-fi shop as a standalone purchase, bundled with the ePub edition at a discount. I’ve submitted it to Spotify, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books. By the time ACX flips the switch on Audible, the book will already be living in half a dozen places.
Surfing The Interstates - “Epigram”
Can you pick which is AI and which is my voice? Answer at end of post.
While I was waiting, I did something I’d been curious about.
ElevenLabs offers professional AI voice cloning — you feed it enough audio and it trains a model on your voice. I bought some tokens, uploaded two hours of my own narration, and let it work. The result was unsettling. It sounded like me. The timbre, the cadence, even some of my particular rhythms came through.
Then I had it read the memoir.
Flat where it needed to breathe. Pacing that steamrolled the pauses I’d spent weeks calibrating. And at moments — words I’ve said ten thousand times in my life — it simply mispronounced them, with complete confidence.
A voice trained on two hours of a man reading his own memoir could not read that memoir. What it couldn’t replicate wasn’t the sound — it was the understanding. Every pause in this book belongs somewhere specific. It marks a breath before something hard, or the beat after a joke lands, or the silence where a road stretched out and I didn’t know what came next. You can’t train a machine on that. It has to have been lived.
The working title for the full memoir trilogy is The Spaces Between. I chose it a while ago because the real story of a life isn’t in the events — it’s in the gaps, the silences, the weight between one thing and the next. Turns out the audiobook proved the title. The AI had my voice but couldn’t find the spaces. It didn’t know which silences were grief and which were wonder and which were just a man on a road with no idea what was coming. Those spaces are the book. They’re everything.
AI has a long way to go in this department. I say that with relief.
Something else happened while I was sitting in that chair, reading sixteen chapters into a microphone. I didn’t expect it. For a year I’d been on a treadmill — writing the book, publishing the book, promoting the book, formatting, uploading, redesigning, re-uploading. The machinery of getting a thing into the world. And now, finally, the machinery has stopped.
I’m beginning to feel like a field that’s been left fallow for a year. Quiet. Open. Something is coming up through the soil, and I don’t know its shape yet. I’ve stepped off the plan I’d made for Books Two and Three — the rigid trilogy treadmill — and instead I’ve created sections here on Substack named after each book, places where I can trial-balloon ideas, accumulate fragments, let the work find its own form. Maybe the next book gets written in a way I haven’t thought of yet. I feel it approaching. Not as obligation, but as duty — to myself, and to Thea Ramsey, my partner and lover, who died at thirty-seven. Sometime this summer I will have already lived exactly twice as long as she did.
Thea had a saying. Whenever something happened to us — something funny, something terrible, something so strange it could only happen on a small island in the Caribbean — she’d look at me and say, “There’s one for the book.” She always believed there’d be a book. She also knew she wouldn’t be here to read it, because she was born with cystic fibrosis and was already living on borrowed time.
I owe her story a voice. The only one that knows where the pauses go.
Surfing the Interstates is available now on Substack and Ko-fi. Coming soon to Audible, Amazon, Spotify, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble.
The road that started in 1973 finally has a soundtrack. In the only voice that could tell it.
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So entirely beautiful. I’m going to guess your actual unaltered voice is recording #1. I use both your photo and your thoughts to conclude that.