I am attemting to do

I am not sure exactly what you are asking.
I spent a year of tuition at film school learning how to record digitally; are you asking me to pass all that time, effort and money to you for the $3 fixya will send me in 8-10 weeks?
I am sure that cannot be what you are asking, and I certainly cannot imagine how to express all of that information into a single email message.

If are looking for some advice how to successfully start down the path, go to Chapters and pickup Digital Recording or Protools for Dummies. These kinds of books are superior at taking a specialist's body of knowledge and explaining it in laymans terms, which does sound like what you are looking for.

As far as the most basic primer goes, here I'll try a few lines: The point of the exercise of recording, mixing and mastering is to have the highest possible Signal-to-Noise ratio, where the Signal is the sound of your vocal track and Noise is the silence in the background. When you look at the VU meter, or bouncing green/orange/red line, that moves when you talk into the mic it should top out at about -6 to -8 db. (In a post studio, one would begin every sessions work by playing a 1KHz tone and then dialing the mixer's level up until the meter reads the in the -8 db range. You have to learn to calibrate your gear.) If you are going to be shouting into the mic, shout and turn the level down to -8db; If you will be whispering, whisper and mix to -8db. You can't hope to have a commercially acceptable sound without starting with the best signal-to-noise ratio possible.

I am not sure which of the ten things you can skip learning to get to the one thing you need to know, but I really recommend learning how to calibrate and setup your gear before trying to record anything. Understand what your preamp and mixer are doing, and what the basic dials and trims do before trying to jump into the deep and of the pool.
Go ahead and skip engineering school if you like, but invest in a few chapters out of a book at a bare minimum.

I hope that helps.