Notion, guys. Notion is The Shit.

 

Phew. Thank goodness for Notion helping me keep track of my progress on Current Book (on the last 3 books, actually) – because I am so natively INCAPABLE OF THINKING IN AN ORGANIZED WAY.  I’ve tried everything I could find over the years to help me keep track of and be reminded of my scheduled activities.

Nothing worked.

I don’t know why – my adhd wiring just didn’t click with anything else i ever tried.

And then in January, I began taking productivity classes – very aware that starting to work with Cinnabar Press would mean consistent books (yay!!) – and that I really needed to figure out how to manage my scattered brain!  And one of the tool suggested in one class, was Notion.

Notion is easy (short learning curve), incredibly flexible, powerful, really clean UI for those of us with dyslexia for whom clutter is DISASTROUS (see previous blog post on how much i HATE the WP CMS UI).  It’s easy to make things attractive….basically everything is thorough, incredibly organized, and easy to follow.

Creating a system to time my chapter recordings and post-processing and take notes on fixes I need was really easy with minimal tinkering, and by god I CAN KEEP 4 PROJECTS GOING AT ANY ONE TIME AND KNOW WHERE I AM ON EACH AND WHICH THING I’M WORKING ON TODAY TO MOVE TOWARD THOSE GOALS.

guys….I cannot organize my DRESSER.  I cannot remember where I set down the pen I was just using.

Notion is allowing me to keep track of a (sekrit! between books!) project I’m working on that has literally 150 multi-track effects recording going on.  Plus a massive, years-long study project with hundreds of elements, many of which i need to keep notes on that i can cross reference by linking them to each other across the databases….but since databases make my eyes cross, i’ve never used them.  Notion makes databases easy on the eyes, flexible, intuitive, and as powerful as you want them to be – or as simple as you want them to be.

Here’s one video (among many dozens on youtube alone) showing how Notion can be used.  He’s got a really developed system that can look overwhelming at first glance -but that’s okay! You can start with a to-do list. And then maybe one item on your todo list could stand for some note-taking.  so you turn that item into a page…which still sits within your original list, but when you click on it a pop-up page appears, with all the notes you’ve taken.  Then you might realize that several things on that todo list are linked, and that setting the pages up in a table where you could have tags to crossreference them with would be helpful.  So you do that.

….and 2 months later you’ve got a super organized, easily navigated, attractive, easy on the eyes, information system that lets you organize, archive, plan, track progress of, just about anything in your life you could think of 🙂

It’s free for individual users – jump in!  Ali Abdaal has links to some templates to start with – Notion has many many templates from the simple to the complex, so you can just play with them, throw bits out….PLAY!  See what happens 🙂

….you’re welcome 🙂  I hope!

deep cello rambling

In my most recent blog post, I lead with a photo of a cello. A couple of photos of a cello actually LOL  As I noted, it had been quite a long time since I had last played – life had happened, cello fell out of my brain and it was…just something from my past. I couldn’t explain it, it didn’t trouble me much, in fact the hardest part was letting the actual instrument and bow go. Of course cellos – and this is not very well known cello bows which can cost easily half the value of the instrument – are expensive. They are quite the investment of money. Even more than the cost issue, I had commissioned my previous cello to be made, with specific ideas in mine.  This wasn’t any big expensive thing, just a fluke of luck. Likewise my cello bow was another fluke of luck, found for less than half the market price – a jewel, a prize.

My previous cello was (to start shallow) a stunning gold-red with a soft velvet finish, a beautiful upfront really complex sound, and a light resonant body that sang with overtones at a simple tap on the wood. It was easy to make sound really good, and not too difficult to make sound amazing. The bow was a fantastic find, making the cello sound half again as good as it would have otherwise. This came home to me really clearly when I sold the cello.  The young man who bought it played it for his trial with his own bow, and my cello sounded lovely of course; but then just for fun, and because he had never played with such a good bow, I had him play with mine. And after just a couple of notes he stopped, stunned, and we stared at each other and then both just laughed. He negotiated with his father to purchase that bow with the cello – and I made sure that it went home with him.

A few weeks ago, when I realized that the cello part of my brain had woken back up, I figured I would look around and eventually, perhaps, maybe, it was conceivable, find – say – a carbon cello. Used, probably. So I went to one of my favorite websites just to look around. Because that website has really good sample sounds for their cellos, it was going to be very fun to listen to many different instruments – from student quality entry-level instruments, to a very nice carbon cello, to intermediate instruments, to young professional instruments, to an astonishing 300 year old Italian cello, which sounded like butter melting in a sweet springtime sun. Wow.

I never intended to find a cello I wanted. I never considered I might listen to a cello I would like to have right now. I never intended to get into a conversation with the owner of the business… and yet that conversation happened. And the next thing I knew, we were listening to and discussing cellos in an enjoyable 90-minute ramble that covered everything from playing Cello’s with hand injuries, to riding horses on beaches in warm sunny climes.

What amazed me was to listen, for a third time, to a cello that hadn’t caught my ear before, and realize it was a truly lovely instrument. I hadn’t noticed it on the first few listens because it was so very different than my beautiful beloved reedy, room-filling, gold-red cello. Where my old cello was bright and up front, this cello was buttery smooth, integrated as if it were a ten-year-old instrument, very even from bottom to top (which is very unusual in a young instrument and indicates a lot about its intrinsic quality) and complex in a very subtle way. It isn’t a cello that would stand out played in a group, but it is a cello that will rivet your ear listening to it alone. It is a cello that was arresting, and yet soothing, and yet fascinating.

Dear reader, need I say what happened next? Quite unexpectedly I had come into a small sum of cash, and while I was very happy having it in savings, purchasing a cello is almost never a loss. The more a cello is played the more mature the sound becomes and the greater its value….so purchasing a cello wasn’t throwing money away, it was just keeping it in savings in another concept.

Within 12 hours the cello was on its way to me, and after trying several bows I am enthralled in a way I did not realize I would ever be again. And certainly not in a way I could ever be by a subtle instrument as in contrast to an in-your-face, grab your attention instrument LOL I have been playing it for a couple of weeks, and am enchanted.

Cellos go through many stages of breaking in, the first being the first couple of months a new cello is played consistently. After that there is about a five-year stretch where the cello matures slowly, and then somewhere between that time and 10 years, there is a jump to a much more integrated consistent sound. After that, it simply gets better and better like a fine wine.

I have profound hand injuries, especially on the right-hand – which is of course the hand which takes the most strain, as it is the hand that holds the bow – through which a considerable amount of force will be distributed, even with the gentlest technique. My original instructor was quite the wizard at figuring out technique for my bow hand that would protect it from most damage. And I have been relearning, from many videos of the cellists who that bow technique drew on the most, how best to bow all over again. And, since my goal this time is very different than my goal a decade ago (which was to play concertos, at which I was very successful having been a classically-trained musician my whole life) this time, I am taking my time. I want to make sure my bow technique is as light and non-stressful and gentle and yet resonant as it can be, without further damaging my hand. In fact, I want playing my cello to be a consistent form of strengthening and physical therapy for that hand.

 These days what I most want to do on cello is play by ear (again, musician for my whole life, this is just part of my skillset – for which I am grateful, since it gives me another way to create!). Play with my spouse’s amazing electronic music, with which I do some nonverbal vocalizing to make lovely pieces, and which would work equally well with the human-voice-plus sound of my beautiful mellow sounding new cello. I want to play what is in my heart, rather than what is on a music staff. They are equally good goals, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison to try to judge one over the other. I am simply in a different place in my life, in my creative career, in my creative goals, in my creative collaborations, in my current audio projects.

My soul wants to play the cello at this time, my soul is what responded to hearing a cello after all this time, and my soul is what wishes to sing through my lovely, red buttery instrument.

hello and cello!

 

 

Hello blog!

Well, it appears I’ve got JewelWing.net up and running!  Almost mostly!  I do stil really loathe the WP CMS, but at least I found something that I can work with – and that has music players and podcast players when I want them, and allows for embedding from other audiobook/podcast/music streaming sources if I’d like that.  So…all in all, a win!

Which is to say, I claim victory over a brand-new-to-me CMS and shall now do a victory dance, although you don’t get to see it 😀

Why did I create another website?  Well, IvyTaraBlair.com was very much intended for my audiobooks, and I wanted to have a business name that covered more aspects of what I do. 

I’m a musician, I’m a photographer, I dabble in podcasting – though I must admit I’m very hiatus on them right now!  I started podcasts because I was between books, whereupon *three books in a row* descended upon my extremely grateful head, absorbing the past 7 months!  I produce my own audiobooks – thus am an editor and producer as well.  I am going to be producing an audiobook for Cinnabar Press – which published Not My Ruckus (so so so amazing a book, seriously guys – LISTEN TO OR READ NOT MY RUCKUS BY CHAD MUSICK.  It’s just…a book that will devastate you and yet you’ll want to come back to it and celebrate with it. okay, parenthetical freak-out over!) – and, again, audiobook producing is very different than audiobook narration, so that’s a new category, too 🙂  In the year of the pandemic, i finally relented and let myself start to use twitter as if I’m a real human, rather than using it to put out 5 posts when I have an audiobook release – so there’s been a goodly amount of tweeting!

And on top of all of these things, there are upcoming projects that will *also* be featured here, that aren’t strictly audiobook related.  Basically?  I expanded the scope of what I wished to put under one roof – and thus JewelWing.net 🙂

Just like I haven’t been much of a twitter person until recently, I haven’t been much of a blog person in aeons.  And I thought, well, as long as I’m creating a website that is no longer only an Audiobook Portfolio Site…I might as well start blogging again, too.  We’ll see how well I can keep up with that!

I have even considered doing some, well, lets say ‘light weight vlogging’ ??  I’m a semi-professional photographer, so I have the gear I need to do a reasonable vlog; the question is, how much would Ienjoy that?  I really don’t know!  So I think I’m going to try it and find out! 

….oh my… a thought – vlogging in my very Apocalypse In Progress hair 😀  Which consists of a #2 clipper attachment LOL  I go from ‘cute velvet silvery head’ to ‘fluffy silvery dandylion head’ depending on how recently the  clippers have been employed!  Alas, I want my haircut back.  I am lucky enough (unlucky enough?) to be in vaccine phase 1b rollout, and my jab is scheduled for a couple of days from now – so gosh, I guess haircuts are something that I can do without endangering anyone!  ….time to stop applying clippers to my head and let my dandylion fluff grow out!  ANYWAY – video!  I think it will depend a lot on a project coming up that might work well with video.  We’ll see 😉

So, yes!  Many things!

Since I haven’t written much about me (previous site being focused on audiobooks only, I kept my posts related to that…and then they got lost in a site-collapse LOL), some factoids!  I have a border collie I adore, two grown children I adore, a spouse I adore, and 3 cats who make all of us laugh all the time.  I am not allergic to the humans, but I am allergic to all of the animals, alas!  But if I don’t fur actually on my face, and if we keep air purifiers running, I can co-exist with all the furry critters, which is good because they make life so fun.

I live in Montana, where the offleash border collie friendly hiking literally surrounds us in every direction.  Collie and I go hiking all the time.  Hiking got a bit interrupted after I got covid last year, cause damn that thing wipes you out even if you have a ‘mild’ case (mild was still the sickest I’ve been in 25 years).  But I love to hike, and I’m damn lucky to live a stone’s throw from All The Hiking.

I’m an avid cyclist.  I got a leash attachment for my bike this spring!  And Wish the collie is learning to trot next to the bike, it’s really fun!  We won’t be able to bike in the truly hot weather, but spring and fall I’m really looking forward to puppy biking 🙂

I’ve been a photographer for a couple of decades, primarily candids and big outdoors-y things.  Photographs will undoubtedly show up here 🙂

I’m a breast cancer survivor, and a very fortunate one.  It was caught early, it was surgery-ized completely, I didn’t need chemo or radiation, and it’s about the most common ‘survive till you’re 85 and die of something else entirely!’ variety of breast cancer.  Was it scary?  Probably.  Did I focus on that?  Clearly not!  It’s still something I’m processing, even now a few years after.  Cancer – don’t get it, kids.  0/10 experience, do not reccommend! 

I have a whole host of conjoined comorbid illnesses that are boring to recount, but suffice to say they add up to constant fatigue and very intermittent functioning.  About the only thing I could be is an audiobook narrator!  Because I record in my home studio, and can always make it across the house and sink down into another world in front of my microphones.

And how the heck did I end up BEING an audiobook narrator??  Man, there are probably a thousand paths to this strange work – but mine was pretty much ‘shot out of a cannon, straight line to current location.’  I’ve been recording myself since I got a tape recorder as a little kid.  Rapidly I appropriated a second tape recorder so that I could sing harmony with myself and record that LOL  I have recorded books for friends, for myself, and eventually someone said, ‘Tell me again, why aren’t you doing this professionally?’  So I jumped in and started learning the ropes of the actual biz side of things – at which I am just not good LOL! 

But what I most wanted to find as a narrator, was a small press that I could work with consistently.  As I began building a catalog of audiobooks, I sent auditions to all kinds of small publishers, and just got nowhere with it.  I knew my narration style was off the beaten track, and that wasn’t going to change, so after a while I just…decided to stop wanting, and simply to wait and see what happened.  And what happened was a pandemic; and suddenly we were alll communicating online, and so I decided to use twitter as it’s meant to be used – to interact, to make connections, to comment on the world and have conversations about it.  Out of that came an author who handed me two quick books in succession and champions my work whenever he gets a chance (THANK YOU PHIL!!), and, at long last, a small press as off-beat and questing as I am – Cinnabar Press.  I am so fortunate to have been found by them, and to have their steady confidence in and celebration of my work.

But Ivy, I hear you saying, why are there cello photographs at the top of this post??

Well, one thing I was avidly for years was a cellist.  And then something happened, and i stopped playing.  But recently, cello started calling my name again.  I never thought it would; I sold my gorgeous beloved cello and bow to a young man on his way to conservatory, and was glad my custom made instrument was going into the hands of someone who would play it for a zillion hours.  I was sad, but for whatever reason, cello was simply ‘over’ and I just didn’t think much about it.  I could hear cello music and enjoy it, I could see cellists playing and enjoy that (have you seen Apocalyptica play?? go watch a video, dAMN!).  I simply felt no draw toward it, and that was okay.

And then…the other day I saw the video of Yo Yo Ma playing cello in the waiting room of the vaccine clinic where he went for his second vaccination – what an amazing and generous man Yo Yo Ma has always been! – and a switch flipped in my head, and Cellist became an ‘I’ identifier once again.  So I had the fantastic fortune to find the fantastic sounding cello in the photos up there, just *exactly* the cello I want, right when I went looking for it…and now it’s on its way here.  To me.  For me to play.  Cello has come back to me.

Will you ever hear cello audio files posted here as Yet Another Thing Ivy Does (!) ?  I don’t know 🙂  I’ll have to re-learn everything about playing, and I know for certain I’m not in the same headspace – former headspace being performing a Dvorak concerto – which I adored, don’t get me wrong! but conventional performance is not at all what I’m drawn to right now.  So we’ll just have to see whether cello shows up on here.  I  strongly suspect it will, but I have only a vague idea in what form that might be.

 

building in WordPress is the worst for the dyslexic!!!

 

WordPress is, to the way my mind works, utterly baffling.  I miss Concrete5 so so much – the CMS I have used for the last 7 years, but which DreamHost has dropped as a one-click install (meaning when my ivytarablair.com site got sporked, there was simply no way to fix it, no recourse.

So, here I am, slogging my way through creating a website that covers a LOT more than the old one could hold – so this is good 🙂  My audiobook work is expanding (or rather I am becoming public with) a lot more than audiobook narration – though that is at the heart of what I do.

so Jewelwing gives me an excellent umbrella for not only the audiobooks, but all my other many sound production hats as well.  And with new projects in the wings, this is perfect timing 🙂

Oh god, so tired, eyes crossing from staring at website inexplicables!

oh dear lord thank goodness for iZotope; again

 

Man, there is nothing more frustrating than being IN FLOW narrating, acting, a really beautiful intense inward story, only to listen to the file and realize something in the studio was clicking, and there are random clicks throughout the recording.  Was it my headphones? they can be a little clicky.  Was it my glasse frames against the pop-filter frame?  I *was* pretty close to the filter.  Was it the headphone cable swinging into something as I moved?  I have NO idea, though you can be sure i’ll be chasing down the problem before i record the next thing!

The amazing thing is, iZotope has a click remover.  Now, I purchased iZotope RX7 specifically because it has this MAGIC FILTER that removes mouth-clicks.  Those are different from random ‘something in the studio hit something else’ – the de-click function won’t remove mouth-clicks.  BUT IT’LL REMOVE THESE CLICKS.  I’m playing with the settings, working on the right sensitivity/frequency/etc. to remove the clicks but not touch the overall sound.  my ear is SO DAMN PICKY…i’ll nail this one down.

I don’t announce books I’m recording – partly because it’s a privacy matter; if the author and I decide to say ‘nah, not the right narrator’ I don’t want anyone to be publically uncomfortable.  But also partly superstition – don’t announce projects!  It might make projects dissapear!

But I’m working on a short story anthology and really enjoying the writer tremendously.  Prose that makes the reading suuuuuper intense just by BEING that way…in a quiet, inward sort of way.  I’m having a blast ;D  Project tba when it’s DONE and BEAUTIFUL.

But meanwhile I’LL BE WORKING ON THIS CLICK ISSUE.

RIGHT NOW I HAVE TO GO TO BED.  SOUND ENGINEERING TAKES A RIDICULOUS AMOUNT OF TIME.

When I first started narrating…what advice would have helped me most?

 

Today a lovely fellow who usually does a radio show, but in this time of freely and joyfully given creativity, asked me if I had any tips on how to read an audiobook.  (audiobooks are markedly different from radio)  …and off the top of my head, here were my answers:

1. I think the two most critical things, and absolutely the most difficult, are 1) slow down  1a) slow down more  1b) ..eeeven more

  and

2. don’t be afraid to leave sPACE!

on radio space is DEAD AIR – BAD

in audiobooks space is EMOTION

space allows the listener to really hear what was said – if the line was funny, if the line was a gut punch – space is where the listener’s imagination takes over

(that said, there are times when zero space is the funniest thing you can do – but that is something that is almost certainly part of your radio repertoir!)

3.  The third thing that I would have told myself is, vary rate of delivery – vary the speed of the prose, based on the emotional roller coaster of the prose.

This is remarkably hard to do for some reason.  i mean, it’s easy to slow down as you reach the end of a sentence – but varying the rate of speed in a paragraph?  that’s not how we normally speak.

Variation of pace in the right places really ups the impact of the words.

4.  And kinda the last thing I’d put in the “OH GOD I WISH I’D KNOWN THIS” category, is vary the pitch of your delivery, ESPECIALLY the pitch at the end of sentences as pitch tends to fall naturally.  Don’t be afraid to let a sentence resolve all the way to the bottom of a declarative sentence!  Whole paragraphs that go by with each sentence-conclusion being a soft, non-commital, semi-tone are incredibly boring – the audience tunes out.

[as a coda I concluded:]  People tend to get too focused on ‘voicing’ – creating a specific voice for each character – you don’t need that nearly as much as allowing emotional cues to creep in – a breath-catch, a hesitation or stumbling, a clipped delivery, a soft one…. you do this kind of thing, and you don’t need to ‘voice’ characters at all.

I hoped this helps him give a lovely reading of the book he’s about to embark on!  May fortune favor your work 🙂

eta: criticism of new acx post [whooo! The Lost Children is on its way to ACX!!]

 

[the addendum at the top has nothing to do with either book or author! this is all about ACX]

ETA: well, i’ve pondered whether to type up an eta on this post and thought i’d let myself cool off from my intense irritation at the time (and this also spares a lot of cranky detail)…but the long and short of it is, between the last book I’d done for ACX and this book, they’d completely changed their final post-production standards. And i mean *completely.*  And not only had they added a chokingly restrictive set of parameters to the post specs, they sound ABSOLUTELY AWFUL.  I mean…seriously….awful.  They crush, absolutely demolish, headroom; they remove the majority of interesting timbre of anyone’s voice; and, basically by way of compressing the shit out of the thing (which is only partly the cause of the above), make it sound suffocated and lifeless.

The industry standard for audiobooks sounds nothing like the ACX final production requirements, incidentally; i strongly suspect these requirements were put in place to homogenize all the various studio and make-shift studio sounds/noise/etc. so as to hide the noise of all the different qualities of those set-ups.

I’ve spent a not insubstantial amount of money to create an all but silent chain in which I record at settings that allow for about as much headroom as you can find outside of professional studios, and use software in post that max out those features while normalizing & compressing enough so that volume is not excessively dynamic, but headroom is retained and voice color is preserved.  

You take my final production and put it through the ACX process (all noise parameters of which my file alread exceeded. by a lot.)?  And it sounds like it’s been rolled under one of those pavement flatteners in LoonyTunes cartoons from my childhood.  When I heard the resulting file I was horrified – it just sounds *awful.*  I, for one, would never listen to an audiobook that meets the ACX standards currently required, because they sound so freakin’ lifeless.

soooo yeah.  I’ve never been that thrilled with ACX – it’s just…kinda the only place new narrators can get a start, now that amazon and audible have combined forces into this huge juggernaut.  But now I will go out of my way to never, ever produce a book for them again.  I’m auditioning much more aggressively to small audiobook publishers than Ihave before.  It’s been a couple years; lets see what I can find.

 

_________

original post:

Pretty much what ACX does at this point is check for basic consistency compliance – did you save at the right bitrate/sample rate, did you leave the right number of seconds at the beginning & end of the file – basic stuff.  What they don’t check for is garbled file uploads – insert horrifed face here when I realized that the third book of the Seeds trilogy had gone out with a file that for some reason in the upload to ACX had been loaded with digital artifacts, and had already sold a bunch of copies.  GAH.  

That’s okay – I’m just as happy ACX doesn’t have a veritable army of quality control checkers, because there are literally dozens of aspects of editing and post-production that could be picked on and that would drive any new audiobook narrator to distraction.  Newbies aren’t getting paid hardly anything when they accept royalty-only contracts (I think my first book has made about 30 bucks in 5 years :D), and while most people don’t launch into an audiobook career until they can perform reasonably well (indeed, that’s why we do this thing – performing is awesome), that has absolutely nothing to do with the other skillsets you also need:  director, editor, post-production quality nit-picker.  

Being an audiobook narrator is not ‘reading a book aloud,’ not by a long shot.  

lolololol – I started to write the rest of this blog post chatting about some of these things, but it turned into a whole damn article.  ..sooo here’s a link instead 😀

 

At any rate, The Lost Children is on its way to its final checks… *folds hands, looks up at deities far and near* may I please not have overlooked any picky acx settings, and may the uploads please not have gone astray, because I would love it if this book came out in time for last minute Christmas presents 🙂

Over Jordan….or why I bombed my entire website and rebuilt it in 2 days (from December 13, 2019)

 

When I decided to do a short run of podcasts to see how that format worked for me, I knew I’d need intro/outro music for it…. music that reflected the ‘unvarnished first-take’ quality that was the theme of the whole ‘Ivy Reads’ podcast.  And then suddenly, it happened – in exactly the best way 🙂

Over Jordan, performed without warm-up, with my oldest kiddo

Here’s what I wrote for the notes on the podcast episodes – because the way this recording came about was so perfect and unplanned, it’s just too fun a story not to share.

If you’re one for ‘The Whole Song + story plz!’ – this post is for you 🙂

I have a lot of polished music recorded to my name…but the whole point of this series is that it’s unpolished reads, and it occurred to me that this version of Over Jordan has exactly the same ethic and origin. Here, let me tell you a story.

*3 years ago, oldest son races upstairs guitar in hand, wakes me up*

son: ‘Mom! I need you to record a song for my D&D campaign!’
me: *mumble* what? what song?
son: I’ll tell you on the way downstairs!
me: *mumble* mmmkayyy…
me: ….do i get coffee first?
son: NO! Must record now!
me: pffffffllfflllfffff

Strangely, despite a singing career that stretched back to 6yo, I had never heard Over Jordan. (he was suitably shocked)

him: It’s easy! I’ll hum it for you! Super easy fast recording np!
me: ….*still mumbling* can i at least look up lyrics?
me: *gets out iPad, lyrics are acquired*
him: it goes like *hummms verse* and then like *hums chorus* got it?
me: you have a lot of faith in your mother. okay. lets do this. ….probably 10 times.

I flipped on the studio power, sat in front of the mics; he stood, guitar stuck just inside the studio door (it’s 4×4 – no room in there for both of us), and we did a rehearsal take.

…..and that’s what you’re hearing. We didn’t need a second.

It’s so fun when that kinda stuff happens 🙂 

I hope each of these reads has something similar – some moment when an un-rehearsed note hits just right – an utterly spontaneous delivery directed only by the prose itself. Cause sometimes? The artist’s sketch is so much more alive than the finished painting, even when it’s nowhere near the final thing.

 

I realize I probably have exactly zero visitors to my site as yet (talk about being an unnamed artist at this time!), but if anyone was here this week, they may have noticed my entire website just went sideways.  Ultimately I had to delete everyyythinnngggg and reinstall the CMS from scratch, and then rebuild the whole site from memory (and the largely preserved text on my tumblr, thank goodness!).  And what I was trying to do was so simple!  Maddening 😀  And what was that you ask?  Stream .mp3 previews for my audiobooks.  That’s it.  That’s allll I wanted!  *shakes fist at html gods*  But now I can – mwa ha ha!

The only thing that truly bothered me about wiping out the website, was I did not preserve the blog posts that I had accumulated during the recording of The Lost Children, and I really liked them 🙂   A lot of bits and bobs about how the recording and editing were going, my use of new post-processing software and what I thought about it, my thoughts about how the loss of my mother in the midst of recording gave added weight to a weighty part of the story.  But that’s okay – more blog posts will be written!  

And here we are – an .mp3 you can take a listen to and enjoy 🙂