podcasting a novel? April 30, 2009
Posted by philangelus in Honest&ForTrue, writing.22 comments
A couple of people have floated the idea that I should podcast one of my novels. Read it aloud, post a chapter a week, and see what happens.
Now, for starters, that scares the living daylights out of me. I don’t exactly have the best reading voice.
(My Patient Husband has an amazing voice. He used to be a lector at our church, and he always Proclaimed The World Of God with that “Wow, this is the way it should sound” kind of voice. Not booming or James Earl Jonesish, but rather, with heart and depth. People stop him after church to say they’ve heard him singing and invite him into the choir. You will note that I have never been invited either to lector or to sing.)
As I mentioned a few days ago, I do like reading my work aloud. This chain of thought started because I want to record my own book for my own listening. PM Griffin of Star Commandos fame does that with her books, and sometimes she’ll just pop in a tape (because she started this back in pre-computer days) and listen to one of her books while cleaning house.
The thing is, I don’t think I’d get an audience. I might try with Honest And For True, which you’ve heard about on this blog and which got shopped around by my ex-agent. I could still take that novel into the secular realm. I’m not sure. (I herad from one agent who asked for sweeping changes but might consider it again after I rearrange the plot.)
There’s another which is a coming-of-age story, again Christian fantasy but with more of a speculative element. A boy’s uncle is killed while practicing black magic, leaving his cousin mute. While he’s trying to figure all this out, he encounters a pair of creatures who are pulling out one of the threads God uses to hold the world together. There are demons, middle-schoolers, jinn, angels, and video games. The whole book is a fun ride and it’s enough of a page-turner that people might tune in for a serial.
I’m just…ugh. I don’t know. I’d have to speak. You know. Like to people.
If you haven’t realized after reading my weblog for so long, I’m a terrible chicken.
So I’ll toss the idea out to you guys: if I were to engage in this kind of project, would you give it a listen? Or would you not? It’s fine to say no; I’d rather hear “no” now than after I put any effort into it.
Thanks!
More about introversion April 29, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion.24 comments
We’ve already talked about how I’m a terrible introvert who scurries away after human contact and hides alone in order to recharge the emotional batteries. 85% of the human population is extraverted, and I honestly don’t understand that. It’s easier for me to write from the point of view of an undead Martian assassin with a gambling compulsion than it is for me to write an extravert.
One of my neighbors showed up at the bus stop looking pale, exhausted. I immediately offered to watch her child get on the bus so she could go home and crash. She said she would tough it out, then told me and the other mom what was going on. Many terrible things. But the strangest by far was that the act of telling us her problems, and interacting with us, restored her. When the bus came, she had rosy cheeks, bright eyes, and an easy laugh.
To me, that’s incomprehensible. I trust that it works for others. I like people and I enjoy socializing, and my friends are awesome. But afterward, I need to recover.
By many accounts, Jesus was an introvert. He kept retreating into private to pray, and people who specialize in Myers-Briggs personality typing all agree that Jesus (like myself) was an INFJ. We INFJs make up one percent of the population, by the way, so the next time you wonder what Jesus was like, think of me, and then after you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, put a warm compress on the stitch in your side from laughing so hard, dry the tears of mirth, and never think of that again. You’ll thank yourself for it.
When I listened to the Word of Promise Next Generation Audio Bible MP3 set this Lent, all the stories ran one into the next into the next. Because it was audio, there weren’t little chapter breaks and story divisions with their own headers. Listening that way, I was just overwhelmed by the sheer number of crowds in the three synoptic Gospels. Just listening, I wanted to retreat and recover.
If Jesus was really an INFJ, that must have been torture. Just being out there, “on stage” all the time, trying to find a quiet place and having people tracking him down, unable to regroup and just listen to that quiet inner voice for a little while. With kids it’s tough enough. With hundreds of people following your every move?
I have no idea how he did it. I’ve been to Comic-Con, I’ve been to anime conventions, I’ve ridden the New York subway system, but in none of those places did the crowd want me in particular. All that talking, the touching, the questioning, the noise-noise-noise… I wouldn’t have been able to do it.
Dear Department of Defense April 28, 2009
Posted by philangelus in politics, sarcasm.8 comments
In response to the flyover of New York City, which was reportedly a photo op and an attempt to update photos of Air Force One near the Statue of Liberty, I have one word for you:
Photoshop.
Any one of the nice folks at Photoshop Disasters would be able to photoshop Air Force One in front of any national monument you choose. I am Photoshop-Stupid, and I could probably do it. In fact, I bet the nice folks at Adobe would do it for you for free if you asked nicely. Surely one of your highly-paid media reps would have been able to figure out the cutting and pasting.
This shouldn’t have been that difficult.
Love,
Me (because I’m having trouble not believing a random pilot went on a bender and thought this would be a good idea, and is now going to sober up at his leisure in a federal prison somewhere.)
A time to stop editing April 28, 2009
Posted by philangelus in The New Novel, writing.comments closed
Remember my literary pause? Well, the time has come to stop editing because ♥My Book♥ has turned into 
My Book .
Yep, that point in time has come when I’m convinced the whole thing is a pile of garbage. It’s dumb, everyone will hate it, and total strangers will stop me on the street to offer to write me a rejection letter. “Dear Author: Please rewrite this before you throw it away, otherwise the landfill will be offended.”
Once a writer hits that point, it’s time to take an editorial pause. I’ve got a few other things I want to do anyhow. I’ll return in a while with my head in the game again.
I know there are still issues, but the problem with editing when I’m in My Book phase is that I can’t get any perspective on this: are the problems cosmetic? Fatal? Nonexistent?
Once I’m in this state, it’s also not clear whether my changes help or hurt. It’s best just to leave it alone. I’ll be back in a week. Let it sit and think about what it’s done.
Of course, I may still tinker. I may remember that line in that scene which would work better the other way. But for now, it needs to rest. Rise like pizza dough, only to be punched down again, knowing that second punch-down will help it rise even further.
I’m such a mean author.
I have a short story I wrote in January that needs to get re-edited. I’m going to submit a couple of poems to a magazine with a deadline coming up. I have a query letter to write to a parenting magazine. And I need to follow up with the editors about the Seven Archangels novels. That’s not even to mention the baby blanket I’m trying to knit for benefit raffle (for the preschooler with stage IV cancer There’s plenty to do. Plenty of reason to tuck in the manuscript and let it sleep for a while.
I still feel urgent, like I want to finish it now. More than that, though, I want it to feel like ♥My Book♥ again.
You’re so pretty April 27, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, pensive.add a comment
At church on Sunday, I had to take my Very Active Baby into the back because he was being Very Active Indeed. Tarzan himself would have look on in envy of the baby’s technique as he swung from parent to parent.
While in the back, of course, the baby planted himself in the back entrance, sitting on the carpet and looking out, hair waving in the breeze, waving whenever a car passed.
A family arrived late to church: an older couple and a girl who looked to be fourteen years old. She wore a dress and had sunglasses that she half-wore, half-dangled. She was talking loudly, and the parents were trying to quiet her. Immediately I thought, “Autism,” and I was impressed that they were bringing her. I know some families with an autistic child have found it impossible to attend as a family because there’s simply too much stimulation at Mass.
At the Sign of Peace, I snuck back up to where my family was seated, and the other family had taken a place right in front of ours. The young lady turned to me to shake my hand, and she said, “I love your outfit!”
(I think she was referring to the Mayawrap. Mine looks like this:)
Then she turned back to me and said, “You’re so pretty.”
I complimented her in return, but she was so thrilled, so pleased. Church was, apparently, wonderful, and here she was surrounded by stylish and beautiful people.
Just for the record, before I walked out of t he house yesterday, I looked at my hair and thought, “I’m the Frizzie Queen.” There are some days you know you look okay, and other days when you know you don’t. I was dressed for church (skirt, blouse, Mayawrap) but I certainly wasn’t beautiful.
She wasn’t lying, though: the compliment had burst out from the center of her. She didn’t want anything from me. She wasn’t trying to bolster my self-esteem.
It took me by surprise because I’m not the kind of person you stop in the grocery store aisle to admire. She’s one of maybe ten people in my life who’ve ever said that at all.
Her parents were embarrassed. I was just impressed by the blessing of a young lady who had no idea that what she’d said was either an embarrassment to her parents or a blessing to me.
Voices and passages April 27, 2009
Posted by philangelus in angels, knitting, writing.add a comment
Ivy read a story of mine on the latest episode of KnitSpirit. It originally ran in The Cornell Review about 18 years ago, but I recently retooled it. She had asked for listeners to submit stories about angels, and as you know, I’ve got a thousand of those.
My story begins at about 8:30, but listen to the whole thing because there are other stories on the podcast.
I love hearing other people read my work. It’s primarily because I’m an extraordinary egoist, and I like hearing my own words. But since that’s not polite to say in public, I’ll say that listening to my work read by someone else gives me a better sense of where the stresses fall in the sentences and how the work actually sounds.
I read it aloud, of course. That’s a part of my editing process. And I’ll read parts of it aloud to my Patient Husband (hence the Patient part, which he’s painfully earned) but it’s not the same thing.
In my writers group, the real-life one, I remember one time that a gentleman got to read my writing exercise aloud, and he really hammed it up. I loved it! But it also highlighted my trouble spots. (Later he said it was the writing that made everyone love it; I said it was the reading. Who knows?)
So in listening to Ivy read my story, I found that in some places, my emphasis fell in the wrong parts of the sentence. (In other words, she read it correctly, but the correct reading wasn’t what I intended.) And in another place, she laughed at something that when I’d written it, had been deadly serious.
That was where I realized, Ivy relates to the 37 year old me, not the 18 year old me who wrote the original piece. She’s used to my sarcasm and she knew from the fact that I send her email that I didn’t die when I was in college. Therefore, at the part in the story when I’m walking home and doing damage control (“a test can be failed, a major can be changed…”) in her mind, there’s no danger.
Whereas when I actually lived through it, I really was talking myself down from a ledge.
I’m not sure if the sentence should be changed. It is what it is. But there’s something funny in a painful way about realizing how stupid the whole thing was and how big it seemed at the time.
The moral of the story? Jane takes herself too damn seriously. Because when I re-read that, I still hear it in my own plaintive voice. It’s hard to disengage.
What grows in the garden April 25, 2009
Posted by philangelus in pensive, religion.3 comments
Moving into a new house has given us a mystery: what’s in the garden?
The previous occupants were gardeners. They landscaped the property and were able to tell me in detail of all the different trees, shrubberies, and flowers they had all over the place. (And the vines, oh heaven help me, the vines…) I remember none of it. None. I’m the kind of person who kills plastic plants just by standing nearby.
This is our first spring in the house, and I’m stunned by the riot of flowers that’s exploding out of the dormant plants. We saw them at the end of the summer, when heat had wilted them and the early bloomers had faded into green. But here we are, now, surrounded by the smells and sights of flowers at their prime.
And sounds. I bet you didn’t know flowers sounded like something. Well, they do. There’s an ornamental weeping something out in front of our house. It has white flowers. The entire thing hums. The nearer you get, the more you can hear the hum. Why, you ask? Why does my tree hum? Because of the hundreds of bees that are in the flowers gorging themselves senseless.
I think it may be an ornamental cherry, but someone told me it’s an ornamental crab apple tree. It produced no fruit whatsoever last year, so I’m happy thinking it’s an ornamental bee tree. As if I’d know the difference.
Bulbs shot up. No crocuses, which makes me sad, but daffodils. And…something. I thought at first they were tulips, but they opened into a dozen tiny flowers all in a bunch. I have no clue what they are.
The first flowers of the spring, though? Tiny flowers the size of a pin head that came up between the bricks on our walkway, on stems the size of a hair. We still had snow on the ground, but this tiny white beauty put up its head in early March.
I planted none of this. I just get to enjoy it.
And here I am, realizing at the same time, I don’t know what skills and talents God planted in my children’s souls, whom they’ll become. I didn’t plant it. I do get to nurture it, but I can’t turn a cherry tree into a forsythia bush.
It’s the same with my own soul, to be honest. I didn’t know at the start what skills or talents God was going to give me, what opportunities, what challenges, what graces, what gifts. Yet here I am, reaping the blossoms of bushes I didn’t plant, fruit from trees I didn’t plant.
It’s humbling: none of this is mine. I did none of the gardening, and yet I’m thriving on the blossoms.
Spucket April 24, 2009
Posted by philangelus in kiddos, sarcasm, writing.11 comments
And what, you are asking, is a spucket?
Every family ends up with its own made-up words. For example, a “muffin-toast” is Kiddo#3’s word for an English muffin. A don-don is the word Kiddo#1 derived for a thing you hang from your rear-view mirror.
When he was five, Kiddo#1 shouted at his sister, “Get away from me, you dumb spucket!”
Cue me wondering what a spucket was. Husband didn’t know either. It took a while to figure it out.
Cyberchase. The main villain is The Hacker. He has two sidekicks, Buzz and Delete.
The Hacker frequently calls them “you Dunce Buckets.” My son, with his inimitable way of parsing spoken language, heard it as “you dumb spuckets,” and derived from this that a spucket is a short, incompetent sidekick.
Thus it was easily applied by a five-year-old to his one-year-old sister.
Since then, we’ve found “spucket” to be a useful term. My brother-in-law, when he had an internship at my Patient Husband’s place of employment, didn’t have a real title and so we called him “Nadia’s Spucket.” I frequently tell my Patient Husband that for my birthday, I want a spucket. I sometimes refer to myself as my Patient Husband’s spucket, which is kind of funny given the difference in height.
Spucket has entered out daily language, and so I pass it along to you. As the English language loses perfectly good words in the postliterate era, such as “sack,” we need replacements in order to prevent our descent into mere grunting animals. Try to use “spucket” in a sentence today. It will do you good, I promise.
Give me the moon April 23, 2009
Posted by philangelus in angels.10 comments
It’s a running joke that I think my guardian angel hung the moon. This is what happens when you’re sixteen and it feels like an angel has taken an interest in you.
The last time I said that, I imagined the response, “Well, actually, just the quarter moon.”
A lot of women have trouble asking for what they want or what they need, and I’m no different. I’d rather do it myself than impose on someone else to do something for me. Whether it’s pride, fear of being weak, or low self-esteem, I’m not sure. But it’s difficult to ask for help even though I tell other people all the time that there’s nothing shameful. As a mother, it disturbs me when my kids could ask for help and instead struggle with something easy for me.
I assume my guardian feels the same way when I struggle with something that’s impossible for me but easy for an angel. On the other hand, I need to stand before God and take responsibility for myself, my soul, my decisions. We know my guardian passed the test; now it’s my turn.
One night, I was thinking how difficult it is to ask for things, and then I thought, I could get around that by asking for something impossible. I laughed to myself and thought to my guardian, “I want the moon. Change the color of the moon to purple for me.”
I thought I felt a startled response.
Smiling, I explained about the impossible thing, how if I knew the answer was no, then I could feel free to ask, and maybe that would help break the block. So I got silly: make it striped. Then I went really ridiculous: make it plaid to match my pajamas.
My guardian angel puts up with a lot from me.
That was February 13th, 2008. February 20th, 2008 ended up being a lunar eclipse.
At about 10:40 that night, I awoke and felt a push: go look at the moon. I crept out of bed and snuck across the house, slipped into the kitchen and looked out at the moon, my red full moon.
I was wearing red pajamas, to match.
My Patient Husband says the moon would have turned red anyhow, but I don’t know. Maybe my guardian angel did give me the moon.
A tale of two carrot peelers April 21, 2009
Posted by philangelus in food, sarcasm.28 comments
At Thanksgiving, we forgot our carrot peeler at my mother’s house. Easily remedied, I thought: I would buy another one.
Yeah, because if it were that simple, I’d be writing a weblog entry about it six months later, right? Hah.
In the Kitchen Gadgetry Section of Target, I went to grab a carrot peeler only to find my choice of thirty-two carrot peelers, ranging in price from $4.99 to a thousand dollars.
I avoided the ones already broken on the shelves (and of course, they were all arranged by brand name, which makes total sense. Don’t you walk into the store thinking to yourself, “I want to buy a kitchen gadget produced by Revere Ware. Let’s see what they’re offering. Ooh, a potato masher!”? I thought so.)
Everyone loves KitchenAid mixers, so I picked up a KitchenAid swivel peeler figuring the technology for those must be pretty simple by comparison.
I brought home the peeler to find it worse than useless. The blade will remain sharp forever, aided by what appears to be paranoia: it swivels away from any contact with a vegetable or fruit skin. If any carrots happen to be reading here, you may send your baby carrots out to play with this peeler with absolute confidence.
The only way I could get it to peel at all was to jam my thumb into the blade, and even so, my thumb was in greater danger than the carrot.
I wrote to KitchenAid and told them they had failed to impress me.
While waiting for a response, I ended up in the grocery store where they sold a brandless carrot peeler for a dollar. I bought it. We’ll just suffice it to say I was able to shred everything in the house that afternoon. My own children fled in terror, and my Patient Husband was the only thing standing between me and an unpeeled world when he told me to knock it off.
Eventually KitchenAid wrote back and offered to replace their UselessPeeler with a EuroPeeler, and would I care to have black, white, red, puce, violet, lavender, blue or paisley? That was far too many choices for someone who can barely think after an entire day of answering questions like “Mom, are there toilets in Heaven?” so I didn’t reply.
At some point, I retrieved the Old Faithful carrot peeler from my mother’s house. Now I had two working ones and one that took up space.
After a few months, I finally replied to KitchenAid with, “Black, if you please.”
Two weeks later, my EuroPeeler arrived. It weighs 5 pounds and fits nicely in the palm. And so help me, although I had no expectations of success, Wolverine and Edward Scissorhands stand on in envy of me wielding that EuroPeeler. My carrots bunch together in terror, and my potatoes shut their eyes. I beg my children to snack on apples just so I can peel them.
It’s unhealthy to care this much about a carrot peeler, right?
But now I need a new cheese grater. You know, so I can have a greater cheese. Do you think KitchenAid makes a EuroGrater?
