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Getting Better
This weekend is the kind that we picture when we think of summertime perfection.
More Appointments
At the behest of my orthopedic specialist, I went to the hospital yesterday for a more detailed ultrasound of my legs. My left foot and ankle have been swelling up for no discernible reason. Since it’s only in one leg, that seemed to have excluded certain diagnoses. We’ll see what the doctor has to say once he’s gotten the images. With my luck, they’ll be sawing it off at the knee.
On Wednesday, I’ll be seeing the audiologist about my diminished hearing. The preliminary test at my primary care site gave the doctor enough concern to have me looked at by a hearing specialist. I can’t say I disagree.
Just last night, driving home from Northampton Community College‘s performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, a song came on the radio and my daughter said: “It’s that Jar of Hearts song.” When it reached my ears it sounded like she said: “It’s that dryer parts song.”
At least I heard her. Sometimes I look at Kelly and her mouth is moving but no sounds reach me at all. After 27 years of marriage, you might think that’s kind of a dream come true but it really isn’t. I like hearing my wife’s voice even when she’s nattering about some miscellaneous nonsense. So, we’ll see what the audiologists have to say on Wednesday afternoon.
5 Seconds Of Summer
If Summer only lasted 5 seconds, that’d be greaaaaat…
In the hopes of keeping you entertained this Summer, I’ve added a couple of my favorite 5SOS songs. That doesn’t actually mean I like summer any better now. I’m just trying to find a nice way to get through it.
Summer songs just aren’t as entertaining as Christmas songs but some of them are fairly catchy.
Since it’s warm without being oppressive like it was last weekend, my beloved has her honey-do list stocked up. We finished refurbishing the bench swing and she ordered a new canopy for it.
Her next project is making a bench out of pieces of the kids’ old swingset. I got the hardware to screw it together but I’m still not getting the vision of what she’s trying to put together. The nuts and screws will attach the pipes to the bench seat but after repeated use, it’s going to get wobbly. She’s going to need to frame the pipes to keep them from wobbling and to protect us from the pipe edges. It’s a work in progress…
My wife doesn’t complain as much as the girlfriend in the song but
she’s kinda hot, tho…
My projects are very much the stay inside kind.
I put together a Season 2 trailer for the Pioneer Skill Set channel. I need to fix up the site before I post the trailer. Right now it’s in a Coming Soon state. I have had the email campaign configured since last year when it was just a basic HTML site. Once I realized the lack of an SSL certificate was causing it to be flagged by Google, I converted it to a WordPress site with the intention of sprucing it up. For a variety of calamitous reasons, I’m only just getting to it now. Better late than never…
I’ve also been working on my Christmas in Month posts in order to be able to drip them out on schedule with the intent of being able to get them done early enough to work on the serial RomCom I’ll be posting for the Holiday Season dailies. There will be an approximately 1000 word scene each day from Thanksgiving through Epiphany that will subsequently be available as a novella in Print on Demand or eReader version for those who don’t want to go back and read the story piecemeal. I’ve also got to revitalize my email list and schedule the drips out to the days they’re dripping on. It’s gonna be Winter, so you wouldn’t expect anything to be dripping but that’s the magic of web technology…
I’ve also got to delete my Christmas All The Time brand account from Twitter because the GMail account it’s based on no longer exists. I’ll also be deleting my personal Twitter account because screw them. I’m sick of all the banning some accounts and not others and general leftwashing on that platform. Basically, screw Twitter. I hope they go out of business.
I have a few other sites that are in desperate need of attention but I don’t want to overwhelm myself. Baby steps, people. I need to get some stuff done so that it can free me up for the other stuff that needs doing. Trying to do all of it simultaneously will guarantee that nothing gets done.
Don’t Tell, Show
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov
It’s fine in draft form to describe things plainly in order to get the storyline down and recorded. The polish is going back and taking the throw-away phrases and actually applying words that show what’s happening rather than telling.
One of the tools that I use for this is listening to the stuff I’ve written so far on my tablet. I’ve got a text-to-speech reader called @Voice Aloud Reader that uses the text-to-speech engine in Android to read the book to me in a tinny robot-lady voice. I had one before that used voice engines to give you a variety of more natural-sounding voices (Victoria sounded like a sultry British librarian, rrrrrrrawrr…) but it went off tech support.
I export my complete story from Scrivener and use Apache OpenOffice to open the exported file and clean out the placeholder tags from the later chapters that aren’t written yet. Once I’ve got it cleaned up, I create a PDF and copy it to my tablet so the app can read it.
Even with the nasally robot-lady voice and the occasional mispronunciation, hearing the story narrated helps me identify the parts that don’t flow well and need more showing, less telling. I have to check the settings to see if I can put in corrected pronunciations for things.
One of my characters is Mary Christmas. She’s an alien from a parallel dimension but she looks like a Christmas elf and does what appears to be magic. Her actual given name is Meirhe Kryzthnyz but most people automatically mispronounced it as Mary Christmas, so it stuck as her superhero name. Meirhe is pronounced may-ra. The app doesn’t pronounce it that way and it’s a bit jarring when I listen because I’m expecting to hear may-ra and it’s saying something else.
That’s all for today. I’ve got tons to do and (for the first time in AGES) I’m actually in a state of mind to do it!