Revise Your Voice

Non-Fiction, Self-Help Book

Written by Lina Rae Pearson after she disappeared from the book narrator scene, where she had been a child star of sorts. An advanced and precocious reader with a strangely adult voice, she narrated thousands of titles starting at the age of eight. The book was supposed to be a memoir looking back, detailing that life of young success and the troubles it presented her. But Lina Rae found the story to be generally uninteresting to go back over, and she was more interested in trying to tell the stories of the world she created in her imagination during her isolated childhood. Still, she found it difficult to do this, and spent most of her time during the writing process at her desk, recording motivational encouragement on her tape recorder and playing it back to push her to keep trying. When she reached her deadline, she found she had only written these motivational manifestos to herself, so she organized them and sent them in. Her publishers were initially confused, but quickly realized they had a new self-help franchise on their hands.

Lina Rae was young and broke when she approached her publisher about writing the book in the first place. She simply needed a place to live outside of either of her parents, who had recently divorced and taken most of her childhood earnings. Her publisher couldn't offer her an advance, sight unseen, but lent her the use of one of her many homes - the one she never went to because it was so far from anything fun to do - out in the country near the town of Ducan. It was here that Lina Rae would come to get to know Francis, Warren and Bill Vernon, leading to the next two books in her "Revise" series.

After the success of the subsequent two books in the series, a "Revised" version of Revise Your Voice was released (pictured here). Of course, Lina Rae narrated the book on tape herself for both versions.