Blog 8-5

8-5

I'm at the library now, not to write, but to burn copies of my uncle's funeral onto CDs.  Each one takes approximately six minutes to burn . . . so I might as well write something, no?

A super old guy just walked past with a book about Iwo Jima in his hands.  My first inclination was to tell him that I was there, and that I still remembered the moment the island came into vie--

No, wait, that was a movie.

It was my Uncle Len's birthday, and a bunch of people got together to remember him (apparently, he had expressed hope that he could have a big birthday get-together, complete with a Mariachi band, when he was hospitalized last year), and somebody paid a Mariachi band to play to our little group.  It was really strange, but hey, it was neat to get together with family members, especially those that drove all the way down from Las Vegas.

Sorry, this is another of those days where I simply don't want to be here.  I keep putting in CDs, getting an error (that they are damaged or unwriteable), then I take them out, put them back in, and they burn fine.  But it's a lengthy process of about six minutes each, once they start to burn.  It's not a big deal, but I sat here for an hour and a half, and wrote a couple hundred words (turned out it was 853), and I think that's what I'll stick with.  Maybe tonight I can record a chapter or two.

I was determined for "Arcove's Bright Side" to be my absolute best work, and for listeners to be positively orgasmic (figuratively or literally) over my performance.  Of course, that's setting myself up for disaster, but hey, you do you.

I actually did some serious recording on the book, but found that, unlike a professional audiobook narrator, who probably puts in six to ten hours in a day*, my voice was absolutely, completely, and totally shot halfway through the third chapter.  Despite having "rehearsed" the book so it could go faster, there was one character who I simply couldn't figure out how to voice, and decided to just mark his lines in yellow and go back to them once I remember the way I'd done it before (my notes were "has a Northern accent, from back of the throat," which SHOULD have been enough).  The character of Arcove has been fun and easy to voice in the past, but I found myself coughing after practically every one of his lines, which means I might have to redo those too.  And you think Abbie's a perfectionist . . .

Audiobook or Writing or Exercise: Audiobook & Writing

*Of course, I have no idea.  It may be far less than that, as we are dealing with human beings here.