I am pleased to say that my book has now been published, but also I’ve moved my blog to – https://www.stuckdave.co.uk/blog
The whole world is on pause.
Well Covid-19 has changed everything. Actually as far as getting my book STUCK (IN TIME) onto Kindle I can’t really blame the virus. I am in limbo whilst I wait for the illustrations (although Coronavirus may be making it harder for Elizabeth to complete them.’ Anyway, I was pleased to hear that last week Elizabeth was drawing a duck (there is a scene in the book when two of the characters are feeding the ducks in the park.)
So we are all in ‘lock-down’ (a very dramatic term that! We don’t have troops patrolling the streets here), and I have been busy writing the second book in the series. Whereas in STUCK (IN TIME) the 3 children go back in time to 1940, in the new one – working title – STUCK (1595), they go back to – yes you’ve guessed it, 1595. What was happening in 1595 I hear you ask – well Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne, and for more info than that, well you’ll have to be patient.
So, I’m fit and healthy, and happy to wait a while longer.
Take My Breath Away
Not just a song by Berlin for the 1980’s movie Top Gun!
It’s been slow but steady progress on the audio version – I try to do a little every day fitting it around ‘real life’. I have been going through each chapter of the book listening for any blips and pops that have to be cut out, but in particular trying to decide what to do about Rachel’s breath. The picture below shows a few words from chapter 11. I have marked in where Rachel’s breath is picked up by the mike.
I don’t know if there are any hard and fast rules about breathing. I mean everyone has to breath! What I am tending to do, is where the breath is embedded in a section of dialogue, or where there is drama within the sentence, as where the arrow on the left points, I am leaving it. However, where the breath is in the middle of a pause between words, like where the two arrows on the right point to, I am cutting it out and pasting in some background noise. When we recorded each day we first started with a few seconds of silence – just recording the room noise, and that is what I have been using to cut and paste over any unwanted breath noises.
Progressing (in an orderly manner)
There is a sequence to all of this – it starts with writing the story, which happened an age ago. I have nearly finished the first ‘listen-through’ of the audio – checking for any passages that are duplicated and either adding or taking away silence, where appropriate. I have not been rushing because I can’t publish the audio version until the Kindle book is published first and I can’t publish the Kindle book until the book cover is ready. It’s been exciting seeing the first drafts of the cover from ‘Mint’ – she is almost ready to start cutting into the lino (it will be a lino-cut print).
Something I’ve never thought about until just now – my generation knows what lino is – we all had floors covered in it (sometimes with a rug on top). Nowadays it would be called vinyl flooring and would be too soft and thin to cut into for printing. So maybe now it is only used as an art material.
Coming back to the audio book I thought some people would be interested in the software I am using – it’s called ‘Audacity’, it works on Windows and is free. Mac users would probably use ‘GarageBand’.
The flat line is silence – I have been shortening or lengthening these – cutting and pasting. When I am happy with the flow of the story I will have to go back to YouTube and learn what to do next!
The answer is 42
You may wonder what the question is. Well, the recording has finished now, and taking a break from editing the audio files I have come back to looking at the draft of the book. In the process of recording the book, at Rachel’s suggestion small changes were made to make the book read better when read out aloud. A word taken out here, a word added there. Also, Rachel got her red pen out! So hopefully all the little mistakes I made with punctuation, or simply missing a word out in error, have been identified – in red. It’s amazing, there are so many! So it has been 42 pages of A4 before I found a page with no red corrections!
Looking ahead I can see that page 43 has 2 full stops missing. Hey ho!
A Sneak Peak
I am pleased to reveal that Elizabeth Newsham, otherwise known as ‘Mint’ is back from her visit to Canada and is all set to start on the illustration for the book. Here are a selection of linocut prints from her collection.
I am very happy that Mint is going to be producing the illustration for the cover – maybe some for inside the book too – because I think that a linocut will give just the right feel for it. As the story involves children that travel back to the 1940’s her style will evoke vintage wood block covers and be just perfect!
Rachel Lawrence
I’ve mentioned Rachel several times on the blog. She is a unique combination of being a gifted actor and is also more or less my editor. She spots little anomalies in the story that amaze me. So grateful for her contribution. We are making good progress with the recording at the moment – she is doing all the creative work, bringing the story to life in front of the microphone, and I am doing the technical stuff.
Getting into gear
…in the New Year.
Back from Australia now and starting to get things in place to resume work on the book. I delivered the newly punctuated version back to Rachel so we can start working on the audio version soon. With this in mind I decided to buy a microphone. I am seeing this act of spending money as a positive statement – that it is all going to happen, and we will be in control. The microphone will be arriving today, together with a stand to fix it to.
As to what microphone I bought, for the technophiles amongst you, it’s an Audio Technica 2020 USB+. You might ask how I chose this one? Well Google isn’t the only font of wisdom in the world. There’s also YouTube! I watched a clip from Bailey Varness (VoiceWorkAcademy.com), and it is the one that she recommends. Apparently it is the best microphine you can buy with a USB connector. In other words you can plug it directly into your laptop. So she has produced a whole series of films, she seems to know what she is talking about, so I looked no further.
Actually choosing the stand proved more problematic. You know what it is like when you enter the world of Amazon and start reading reviews! You think you have found one, then you read one bad review, so you move on, and you end up going round and round in circles. So in the end I decided I couldn’t spend any more time researching this and chose one. Time will tell. I know if it will have been a bad choice if the microphone falls of the desk. Time to move on!
I must put a stop to this!
Well actually the full stops haven’t really been a problem. It’s the commas; those pesky little devils, that are a nuisance. They pop up in all the wrong places! So, re-reading and correcting my punctuation, I find it hard to believe just how many mistakes I have made. It’s what happens when your mind gets carried away racing along with the story, and doesn’t look at the words on the page. It’s much harder to see on the computer screen anyway
Anyway, I can think of worse places to be doing it! For the last 10 days we have been living in a ‘Queenslander’ (a traditional wooden house across the road from Suttons Beach in Redcliffe, Brisbane. I think I have mostly cracked it, so it’s just as well as we have moved to stay the rest of the time with our daughter, and her 3 boys, for Christmas. I don’t imagine I will get much done on it now for a while.
Just how exciting can punctuation get?
The answer is not very! At least though, I am editing the draft of my book in a beautiful place. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t come here to Scarborough in Queensland, Australia just to do punctuation! No, we came out to see our daughter and family, and so I try to do a little every day.
So grateful to Rachel for going through the draft of my book with her pencil. I always did tend to read quickly, skipping through the sentences to find out what happens to the plot. However, Rachel, as an actress has to read every word and consider how to say it. So, even though I wrote the book I still want to race through to find out what happens, and I find it very hard to concentrate on every single word. Also, in my head, I know how it should sound, how it should read, so I will naturally take a breath in the right place, or put the emphasis on the right word, whereas anyone else coming across my story for the first time needs some help – and that’s where the punctuation comes in!
From Keyboard to Kindle 