I never started out to be like Dick Estell or Ireene Wicker, but in fact, the Unbedtime Stories segment of my radio show Dancin’ in the Fast Lane with Ann Arbor premiered along with the show in April of 1993. My radio show was, and still is a music show on KFJC 89.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area each Wednesday morning from 6 to 10 am. I added the Unbedtime Stories segment to my show because I wanted to learn to cold read—to be able to pick up a script and just read it cold.
Unbedtime Stories featured up-and-coming works by up-and-coming authors read by me. Later it included writers who participated in NANOWRIMO, National Novel Writing Month—which one of my listeners introduced me to, and which debuted in the San Francisco Bay Area. For twenty years, I read (or hosted) Unbedtime Stories.
Then audiobooks came along. Since I had read stories on the radio for years, I figured I should narrate audiobooks. In December of 2015, I got started, and I’ve been going strong ever since. To date, I’ve produced about 40 books for Audible.
More than twenty-five years later my radio alter ego Ann Arbor still hosts the show Dancin’ in the Fast Lane, but now that I’m narrating audiobooks when I’m not on the air, I find that I’m reading fewer stories on air.