Author: J Dark

More on making audio books

Audio books are very good at showing you your strengths and weaknesses.  Listening to the narrator read the words I’ve written shows me where I got on rolls, and everything flowed.  It also shows where I thought I had been on a roll, and how discordant the words sound versus when I wrote them.

Another feature is how much you learn how to LISTEN.  Listening is a nearly lost art I feel.  With the absolute flood of immediate information, people get used to ‘immediate and now’.  Nuances tend to be missed.  In an audio book, you have to listen for those shifts, pay close attention to how the words are spoken as much as why.

Description becomes important here as the setting, the where is as important as the other pieces. A verbal description that is good can help pull the listener into the story and experience, rather than simply hear someone reading the words.

All that feedback is there in the narrator, and it is, to me, so valuable to understand how it sounds, compared to just reading it myself.

The revelations of collaborating on an audio book

One new experience I’ve had since being published, is the creation of an audiobook of ‘Best Intentions’. To say it was a learning experience, catches the essence, but it was way more than that.

One thing I’ve learned is that what sounds great in my head, comes out on audio and my first thought is, “What the hell was I thinking?” There were more than a few places that got past me, the editors, and publisher that the audio found loud and clear. I’d read to myself before, but hearing another person put her words to the book brought out and highlighted every flaw in my writing tenfold.

That gave me new incentive to get it right the first time. And I had to learn how to listen all over again. To hear the mistakes, and mark the places to clean up. The narrator had to put up with my mind erratically catching and missing corrections. I made it a lot harder on her, and everyone involved, than it needed to be.

( more about the experience on the next post )

Can you spot the perspective?

I’ve started a story.  Can you identify the perspective that it is being written from?

 

“Mo-om! Hurry up! I got to get to the corner for the bus!” The girl scampered past the walnut-stained oak table and chairs as her mother turned from the refrigerator, and held out a brown paper bag to the child. The girl, her chocolate brown hair done in a pair of pigtails, held by bright orange glass beads and leather ties, skipped towards the door, then turned her pale, freckled face back to the olive-skinned woman in the kitchen. “I’ll see you after school!”

The screen door banged open, the rusty spring giving a groaning tweak as it stretched, then a lower groan as it contracted, slamming the screen back in place. A fly buzzed past the table, landing on one of the matching chairs surrounding it. The chair was armless, resting on four crudely cut legs, that had been squared and joined to the front leg by a cross piece of stained oak. Both sets of legs and crosspieces were then joined by a third crosspiece, joining the two other slats together, forming an ‘H’ between the legs. The front legs were cut flat at near knee-high level to allow the seat to be attached, while the back legs rose, and were joined by two curved slats to create a skeleton backrest. The fly chose the top slat to perch upon as it surveyed the space near it for danger.

The pale, flower-patterned linoleum floor was of no interest to the fly. It had followed the scent of raw meat, flying through the small, seconds available opening just as the daughter had run out. It’s eggs needed protein. The meat scent it followed would supply the new generation. It hovered, then landed on the back of the chair, to rest and re-orient. The woman, clad in blue jeans and a pale yellow blouse, walked past the chair and into another room, startling the fly into flight, then, as it found the scent once more, buzzed over to the counter by the stove.

The smell was overpowering and the fly dropped onto the surface, using it’s feet to hunt for nourishment. Disappointingly, there was nothing but the scent, and no food for it’s impatient eggs to hatch upon. Its attempt to exit the direction it came in was stymied by a harsh grate it was too large to fit through.

The Magic of Perspective

There’s an old adage that says, “There’s your perspective, there’s the other guy’s perspective, and then there’s the truth.”

If you’ve ever been in small claims court, you can see this repeated endlessly. Two people arguing about who is right, who has the truth of it, and utterly convinced that their view, their perspective is the absolute truth.

Some may sidestep this a bit, by laying claim to the absolute of the law, and how they followed the letter of it, even if the results were detrimental to another.  And sometimes this can be a deliberate warping of the letter away from the intent or reason for the law.

But it all comes down to perspective.  How do the people in question on both sides see what happened?

Sometimes in writing, logic doesn’t fulfill the reason for a story. Look beyond just a logical premise.
Llook at other things, like perhaps the mind of a man trapped inside himself, or from the perspective of a chair in a house, which is a silent witness to the comings and goings around it.
Take chances and see what comes from a different perspective.  Because, there’s not just one perspective.

Science and Cyberpunk

Science continues to make amazing strides in technology creation and application.  Note this latest one.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180209170717.htm

Also, this arm seems to be almost cyberpunk-ready.

The force is strong: Amputee controls individual prosthetic fingers — ScienceDaily

These incremental steps are bringing us closer to mechanically replaceable limbs, and perhaps even a nervous system, which would be a way around diseases such as Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Writing, and self-exploration

I find that my own mind can completely amaze me/itself at times. With the new story, being called ‘Beguiling Words’ at this time, I had no idea what would happen in the story. That the title seems prophetic I suppose shouldn’t be unexpected, it’s that how appropriate to the story the title is, has surprised me. I guess the unconscious knows more than the conscious does.

I wonder if that qualifies for schizophrenia?

Writing is also a catharsis. It’s a way of letting the imagination loose to explore ideas, and understand better, some things that trouble me. Being able to articulate fears, anxieties, and dislikes on paper is liberating, but at the same time extremely difficult.

Those things, more than most, are what want to remain hidden in the dark recesses. It’s that being able to articulate them, however incompletely, that gives me a chance to grapple with these hangups and, at least in a story, find a way to deal with them.

A few thoughts on what I’ve learned about writing

What I learned about being a writer is that

a) it’s hard work,

b) there are long days of struggle with few sentences, and occasional bursts of inspiration that can cover pages,

c) the stories are what drive the writer, the desire to see for themselves, what happens next, and finally

d) there is nothing like seeing the end of the story so another can begin.

Writing

I sit here, tapping away on my keyboard to bring you a message of electronic media. Writing can be fun, and snarky, and at times, thoughtful and even prescient. But it does not happen unless someone decides to write. Sharing of stories and ideas is a social process, one might almost call it a social ‘need’.

Writers of any kind are social bellwethers. What is written is part and parcel of the times that they live in, and affect them. As an example, when the nuclear bomb appeared, humanity was shocked by it’s power, and fascinated by it’s potential. Stories and movies appeared that reflected these feelings, both positively and negatively. A famous example is ‘Godzilla’, a creature of the atomic bomb.

Realize we, as writers, are a reflection of the times we live in, and in our writings these values, fears, wonders, and curiosity are reflected. We also shape the future. Another example of this, is are the numerous science fiction stories that presaged the creation of items that now are ubiquitous in our modern world. Lasers, prophesized in H.G. Wells, war of the worlds, is probably the most recognizable example.

As writers, our job, is to entertain, speculate, expose truth, question ourselves and our world, and most of all, stimulate the imagination.

The Importance of reading when writing

Writing is what I like doing, and what I want to do. But I do notice that when I read, words are not as hard to come by.  By reading, I set my mind into looking at, and for, words to use in the story I am writing.  The words still struggle, but I’ve more focus for the writing, and this also benefits in that there are more synonyms that come to mind for a word, and that makes reading more interesting.