Journal – Page 37 – Teel McClanahan

The white noise of diminishing returns, OR: How not to record an audiobook

Shoot, is it Thursday already?

My life is Hell, in fast forward, sometimes.

Did you know that making good, clean, audio is tricky? Yeah. Like, a week and a half, out the window, because I didn’t know I was doing it wrong, and I still haven’t quite got figured out how to do it right. Call it two weeks lost. And now there’s a garbagetruck, I don’t know, revving its motors outside.

Free movie might be better than art walk. Stubbing my toe might be better than recording the audio wrong again. So I’m frustrated and paranoid, tweaking and adjusting and fiddling with things. I probably won’t know when it’s “good enough” anymore, since I thought it was good two weeks ago and have since learned that it’s not. Sigh. I don’t know what to do.

Go have breakfast, I guess. In an hour, I get to drive across town to pick up the generator to power the lights for my space at First Friday. Too bad I can’t listen to my iPhone in the car, or I might have been able to catch up on some podcasts.

Hope you’re having a better life than I am.

I don’t GTD, but I got things done today anyway

Today was a relatively good day. I hadn’t made any overly ambitious plans, I certainly hadn’t made a detailed schedule, but I’d put together a list of things that needed to be done today, and I did them all. Everything on the list was business-related (things like getting the art I sold this week packed up and shipped out, and marking them as sold on the website), and everything on the list got done.

I also managed to write about a thousand words of a short story I’m working on, study (to my frustration) what it takes to make eBooks compatible with MS Reader and Palm Reader, get paperwork over to Lightning Source for getting set up for eBooks (which was then confirmed by email), listened to all of NIN’s Ghosts at least 3 times (I’m considering using part of it for intro/bridge/outro music for my audiobooks, which I am also releasing under CC BY-NC-SA), went to a strange appointment with my car insurance agent which seemed actually about making a contact with a gallery-owner friend of his rather than about insurance, made a nice dinner and ate a big piece of cake as well (okay, I didn’t finish the piece of cake – too much goodness. I mean, look at it!), and watched both of my Netflix DVDs.

Now, I’m going to go cuddle with my wife, and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, more audio work, and more writing, and hopefully another good day.

Weekend oddities

This weekend was somewhat interesting. I’m in between running errands and recording for the audio version of Dragons’ Truth, so I don’t have a huge amount of time to post about it, but wanted to get something up.

I guess I could start with Friday; I received the last of my packages, and now I have near-studio-quality audio recording gear for doing audio versions of my books plus a MiniDV camera for doing internet videos. I spent a lot of time shopping and researching and comparing things, and considering I got the camera itself for $150 (the price of the oh-so-popular Flip camera, but I get a much better picture quality and a much more versatile camera) and a pretty good deal on the audio gear, I think I did good. I won’t be shooting in HD, and I don’t have a proper sound studio, but I’m going to be posting to the internet, so I should be okay for now. Technique is what matters, here.

Saturday, since I needed to go to Pine to pick up a filing cabinet (hooray for family! Even considering the cost of gas, we saved over $100 vs. buying the same thing used), and Mandy had never been, I took Mandy to Arcosanti. Further confirming that I married the right woman, her immediate reaction was “can we move here?” I indicated that if we could find the $80k+ to get out of our debts, no problem, we can move there ASAP. After browsing around the public areas, and after the tour (I believe I may have been a better tour guide than the apparent-first-timer we got), we headed the rest of the way up and around to Pine. Picked up the filing cabinet (& all the art I’d had up there semi-on-display but not selling), stopped for supper in Payson, and came back home.

Church Sunday morning. Grocery shopping. A nap. More nap. Then when we were in the middle of watching a middling movie (Joy Ride), Heath walked in, having just bought Settlers of Catan. Heath, Sean, Mandy and I – none of whom had ever played Catan in any form – all proceeded to play out the “basic” game. It’s interesting. It’s just another one of the way too many good games out there for which I generally have neither time nor companions to play.

Alright, that’s enough time on this, I’ve got some recording to try to do.

Anticipation

So, I’ve had quite a bit of anticipation leading up to the San Diego Comic-Con this year. To some degree it has been like excitement; it has quickened my pulse in a good way as I look forward to the good things. To a much greater degree it has been like overwhelming stress, increasing the pressure on my heart and making every beat a little more intense. Also, because the future is unknowable, any level of anticipation seems directly related to a degree of expectation, and expectations are the sort of thing that can lead to disappointment, so this anticipation may be setting me up for disappointment by the actuality of the convention.

On one hand, the anticipation of the event extends the event backwards in time to me, allowing my emotional and mental reactions to the convention to exist along a longer timeline than the few days of the con. This extension through time would seem a positive thing, since I believe the bulk of my reactions at the con itself will be positive ones. Unfortunately it seems that as long as the actual events of the convention, such as how I will arrive in San Diego and whether I will have enough cash on hand to do things like eat, are indeterminate the anticipation is simply extending a bad feeling as that of not finding myself with a way there or enough money right back into the past.

I am, at this point, certain that I have a reliable and firm transportation to and from the convention, and that I will have plenty of cash available not only to eat, but to buy a few things beyond food and incidentals. Yet the anticipatory bad feelings that I’ve been having for so long linger in me like echos of a future that will never come to be. Like my anticipation doesn’t want to give up on any of the unknowable futures, even the ones with virtually zero chance of coming to fruition, and is trying to extend my emotional responses to those possible futures back to me.

So, although Anticipation seems to have the ability to move emotions through time, backwards from the future (an extraordinary feat), its arbitrariness in which emotions it extends, and from which possible futures, is a major negative mark against it. I give Anticipation one thumb up and two thumbs down.

The Ring – movie review followup

Okay, so I’ll admit that when my room was flooded with direct sunlight in the middle of the day I was able to get several hours of restful sleep today. Still, in the last couple of hours I’ve been growing tired again and thought I’d be able to go to bed without thinking about The Ring or having to leave all the lights on just to not freak out.

Then a TV commercial for The Ring came on. Much of what is depicted, while it may seem creepy to someone who has not seen the movie, managed to remind me of everything that scared me about the movie. Fu*k.

Still, the commercial is right; the ring is one of the most frightening movies in a very long time. It tells you what the movie is about, portrays the fear and horror and weirdness of the movie. Oh yeah, and it’s driven me to drugs. I’m going to go take a sleeping pill and hope it can overcome The Ring.