Watching Over Me | an audio short

This audio short is a true story. Produced as part of the Audio Drama Alliance's 5-minute audio challenge on the theme of "Escape," it recounts the story of one boy's escape from the jaws of death. It was recorded and produced in April of this year.

To avoid spoiling anything, I shall save any further information for the Behind-The-Scenes section below. I hope you enjoy the piece!

@jd

Credits:

"Watching Over Me" was written, narrated, and produced by J.D. Sutter.

Featuring:

Austin Peachey as Damian

Betsy Nicholson as Sister

Alicia Hansen as Mother

Jonathan Cooke as Doctor

Music:

"Summer Night Stars" by ELVGames & PEGGU-SENSEI, courtesy Fanatical

Behind the Making of "Watching Over Me"

The text of this account was written over 25 years ago. As I was starting to seriously get into writing in my late teens, I decided I needed to put down the story of this extraordinary event from my childhood. Yes, this true story happened to me. I originally wrote the piece on our family's ancient Windows PC sometime around 1999. I remember reading it to my family, but it was never shared beyond that. I printed out a copy and put it in a folder of other scraps of writing, and there it has remained until now.

I am so thankful that I printed out a copy because that old computer was gotten rid of many years ago. This was well before the time of cloud backups, and I'm pretty sure it didn't even have a CD-ROM drive. The article may have been on a floppy disc at some point, but if so, I've no idea where it would have gone. But the paper copy in that folder has survived all these years. Through numerous moves across multiple states and cities. In fact, I came across that folder a couple of years ago and even wrote a post on this blog about it, but I hadn't really looked through it thoroughly in quite some time.

But as I was trying to come up with some inspiration for a project to make for the April 2025 ADA Member Audio Challenge, I decided to pull out that sheaf of old papers to see if there was anything in there worth considering. Due to some extremely busy weeks in April, I knew I was not going to have the time to write and produce a new, full-fledged audio drama, but I figured I could dramatize a previously written piece. It had to fit into the theme of "Escape," though, and then I thought about this story.

I pulled it out and re-read it, and immediately knew that it was time for this story to be shared. I put in a call to my mom and dad and talked over the whole event with them again to make sure I had the info and details correct. Then I did a little polish on the original text. It is largely unchanged aside from the addition of a few details and alterations to some word choices here and there. I like to think I am a better writer now than I was in my teens. Even so, if I had had a bit more time, I might have done a more thorough edit, but I am satisfied enough with its current form.

By the time I had decided on producing this particular story, phoned my parents to confirm the details, and done a few edits on the text, it was already April 16th. The project had to be completed by the 30th in order to make the challenge deadline, so I was quickly running out of time. I could just produce a narration of the piece with some sound effects, of course, but I wanted to bring it to life a bit more than that. So, even before I had spoken to my parents or started editing the story, I reached out to my amazing ADA peeps to see if they would be interested in performing a few lines of dialogue for me. They graciously agreed to lend their voices to the project, even without being given much detail. There was no finished script, so all I could send them was their lines and a tiny bit of context. And they delivered! Lots of thanks to these talented folks!

I finally had the time to record my narration on the evening of April 25th, and I immediately began post-production straight after. Over two days, I spent a total of about 6 hours on editing, audio processing, mixing, and sound design for this 5-minute project. One of the quickest pieces I've produced to date, aside from my single-voice narration projects. In addition to the 5 voice tracks and 1 music track, there were 28 other sound effect clips used in this production. Also on the low end for me, but time constraints forced me to keep things simple.

Final Details

There were a few little things that I didn't have time to fit into the narrative. For one, the doctor didn't just say, "stupid dog!" once; he said it multiple times throughout the surgery, and a few times he added some more colorful words too. Speaking of the surgery, I was not put under for it, so I was awake the entire time. When the doc had finished stitching my face and the gash on the back of my knee, he had already started putting away the tools, and he had my mother start to help me down from the bed when it was noticed that the bedliner was stuck to my thigh in a couple of spots. It turned out that there were more lacerations there that had been missed in the initial examination. So it was back up on the operating table for more stitches. There were only a handful required for these additional spots, and the doctor explained to my mom that local anesthetic injections would likely hurt as much as just sewing up the wounds, so he ended up sewing those without any more anesthesia. The previous anesthetics had worn off, so I felt every painful stitch. Thankfully, it was over pretty quickly, but my mother had to hold my legs down so I wouldn't move during the process.

I am happy that I am finally getting to share this story in this audio format. Many times over the years, I have told it to people, and of course, it was recounted a lot in the days immediately following the event. But I haven't thought about it in a very long time. Now the time has come for more folks to hear this testimony of a little boy whose life was saved by the mercies of God. This is not one of those "based on a true story" projects that loosely resembles actual events. It is a 100%, accurate retelling of that day that I hope will be impactful to those who hear it.

Thank you for checking out this audio production. Please share it, and if you enjoyed it, consider buying me a coffee by clicking the banner below. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments too.