Late night, reading Edna O'Brien's A Pagan Place, it returned. The
glimmer that tells me I am soon going back to writing. Not FB promos for my new book, The Reason for Time, not podcast scripts and website updates, not emails to friends and associates to inform them of events and appearances, and ask them to share, share, share. But real writing. The next novel.
The first episode of the podcast, "This is the Reason for Time," is almost ready to upload. The script writing part of it was interesting because it wakened a style I used when I wrote radio dramas, which I loved doing when CBC still had a radio drama department. The recording part was more of a challenge. How to read and at the same time sound as if I was speaking directly to listeners. The wonderful Ethel Whitty, who agreed to read my character's voice through the ten episodes --chunks I had selected for her -- is more of a pro. She simply sat down and started to read, and when she knew she was drifting, reading the words without buying into them, she shut off the mike and started over. Even more challenging, the edit, carried out by my 16 year old buddy Harris Dixson, supervised by a retired recording engineer who lives in the neighbourhood. We finished a day or two ago, and while a few minor glitches remain, the episode is going to upload next week. Only nine more episodes to go, but all the pieces - my voice, Ethel's, the music, the sound effects - are recorded. And editing will be easier the second time, my buddy and I feel.
This is truly diy book promotion, and it always feels like I'm moonlighting when I do something other than what I am meant to do. But since I explored the writing itself in the script, the why and how of it, the podcast is genuine in that I had not thought of those things in a formal, ie, communicable sense, before -- at least in relation to The Reason for Time. With luck, the podcast will grow legs that can walk to all the places my publisher cannot afford to send me.
Theoretically, I will then be free to reach for my notebook, or move to the computer when I feel the urging of inspiration in my mind, really my entire self, reading phrases like this, from O'Brien, at night: "Emma begged to be let make pies to pass the time. Your mother went and picked rhubarb. The stalks were young and the skins came off in shreds. When she chopped it a pink juice oozed from it..."
And this, from my daytime reading of James Joyce: "Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with the their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones."
Words that create a thousand pictures...
The first episode of the podcast, "This is the Reason for Time," is almost ready to upload. The script writing part of it was interesting because it wakened a style I used when I wrote radio dramas, which I loved doing when CBC still had a radio drama department. The recording part was more of a challenge. How to read and at the same time sound as if I was speaking directly to listeners. The wonderful Ethel Whitty, who agreed to read my character's voice through the ten episodes --chunks I had selected for her -- is more of a pro. She simply sat down and started to read, and when she knew she was drifting, reading the words without buying into them, she shut off the mike and started over. Even more challenging, the edit, carried out by my 16 year old buddy Harris Dixson, supervised by a retired recording engineer who lives in the neighbourhood. We finished a day or two ago, and while a few minor glitches remain, the episode is going to upload next week. Only nine more episodes to go, but all the pieces - my voice, Ethel's, the music, the sound effects - are recorded. And editing will be easier the second time, my buddy and I feel.
This is truly diy book promotion, and it always feels like I'm moonlighting when I do something other than what I am meant to do. But since I explored the writing itself in the script, the why and how of it, the podcast is genuine in that I had not thought of those things in a formal, ie, communicable sense, before -- at least in relation to The Reason for Time. With luck, the podcast will grow legs that can walk to all the places my publisher cannot afford to send me.
Theoretically, I will then be free to reach for my notebook, or move to the computer when I feel the urging of inspiration in my mind, really my entire self, reading phrases like this, from O'Brien, at night: "Emma begged to be let make pies to pass the time. Your mother went and picked rhubarb. The stalks were young and the skins came off in shreds. When she chopped it a pink juice oozed from it..."
And this, from my daytime reading of James Joyce: "Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with the their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones."
Words that create a thousand pictures...