The Perfect Song Blog

I’ve talked to many people about doing an audio recording of my novel, The Perfect Song.  Younger folks said yeah, they’d be  more likely to download or stream it and listen to it than they would read it.  Some older folks with vision problems welcomed the chance to hear it on CD.  So that’s what I’m doing.  I spent nearly two months recording it.  Now I’m editing it, a long, arduous process that’s given me yet another whole new outlook on the book.

I worked awhile to determine the sounds and textures of the characters’ voices:  Mendel, the artist,  would remain close to my own voice; Poul, the shiftless man looking for easy money,  would have a thin, nasal sounding voice; Beasely, the ambitious publisher, would have an aggressive, assured voice.  Harry the beach bum would have a big, boisterous voice.  Mara is soft and self-assured.

I’ve now edited seven chapters.  My son, Nathan, a musician, is creating sound loops for the music beds.

Today I took the iRiver out and recorded my footsteps through the wet, mushy ground.  I’ll use this in the passage where Poul gathers papers after a thunderstorm. Last week I recorded my footsteps down by the creek and through the tall brown grass  along the bank. 

Open your ears and  there’s a whole new world.  There aren’t just “footsteps.”  There are hundreds of types of footsteps through different environments, with different shoes, different sizes and weights  of humans. 

More later.

I felt like my webiste www.perfectsong.net was getting large and nearly unmanageable.  I’ve posted the equivalent to a whole new book in my Muse section.  So, to get a little more efficient, and to be able to communicate more regularly, I’m starting this blog. 

Some background:  I wrote the novel, The Perfect Song, over the course of 25 years and published it last year.  It’s been getting great reviews http://perfectsong.net/reviews.htm so check it out sometime.  I know many of you already have.

I’ll be adding a chapter a week to the excerpts section so if you haven’t read it and can’t afford to buy the book, you can read it online.  If you feel like making a donation in lieu of buying it, you can donate to my paypal account or send a check to the Mansfield University Foundation, Mansfield University, Mansfield PA  16933.  All money from the book goes into a scholarship fund for future writers.  The contribution is tax deductible. 

I’m the PR director at Mansfield University.  Today the admissions director, his assistant and I visited a group of high school students to see how they look for colleges and find information in general.  Funny, in this hi-tech age, most of them said they started by asking friends and family.

Then they switch over to the Web to check out colleges they may be interested in.

We asked them what their biggest fear is about the future. All of them said they most feared getting stuck in a job or profession they don’t like.  They all said they want to be in a profession that gives them pleasure and where they can make real contributions.

Only two of them have myspace accounts.  A couple said they’d been seeing news items that myspace isn’t such a good place to be.  So maybe myspace has peaked and there’s a backlash brewing.