I had to take liberties again in this episode, because I have no idea how to translate “…” into audio. Which is unfortunate, because I LOVE “…” in text.
I could be wrong, but as far as I know using “…” as dialog was first introduced in JRPG imports such as the Final Fantasy series. It’s perfect, because anyone who reads a lot knows exactly the emotion that it conveys. The only problem is that it isn’t a word, it’s punctuation. And as a narrator, you aren’t allowed to read punctuation. It sounds stupid. No one says “exclamation point!”, and no one should say “ellipses” or (if ya ain’t as high-falutin’) “dot dot dot”. In Chapter 20 I just left a long pause. But that wasn’t an option here, as it was both explicit dialog, and quoted in the response.
So I made do with a narrative description that I hope best captured what “…” was implying in this particular case. It’s inelegant, but I couldn’t think of a better option.
RSS – All Posts
iTunes
Stitcher Smart Radio
Google Play
Email – Episodes only
I think, your way sounded pretty well (btw, thank you A LOT for all your work, it’s just priceless), but can you consider something like white noise in this particuar case?
Or maybe some sort of acoustic feedback? Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Acoustic_Feedback.ogg
I guess, it can work as a sound of tense silence :)
* particular
When I’m facing this problem while reading out loud, I just go ahead and say “dot dot DOT!” in the same tone that Nale should have used for his “Dunh dunh DUNH!” in the last panel of the following Order of the Stick strip: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0821.html
So far, everybody seems to enjoy it. :-)
The first thing that came into my mind was replacing it with “right?”, but your way works pretty well