The last couple of days have been really good ones. I’ve been recording Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue, which I’m having a great time doing. I really like October Daye, the main character, and since the book is first person it’s fun to “be” her for a couple of days.
Yesterday evening, I went out with M– one of the fine folks at Brilliance, who also turns out to be a writer. She and I hung out a Jumpin Java and wrote for a couple of hours. It was a very nice break from the routine.
After work today, I went out to dinner with J– at Kirby’s and it was so nice to just hang out and shoot the breeze. It helps with the whole mental fatigue that comes from reading for hours.
It is surprisingly tiring. I mean, on the face of it, all I’m doing is sitting in a chair and talking, but I have to be word perfect and that requires a weird sort of concentration. I’ll do a post at some point about what that focus is like.
For the moment, I’m heading to bed. We’ll wrap up the book tomorrow.
A few years ago, I donated my time to the local university’s program for students with learning disabilities. They’ve found that if the kids can listen to their textbooks on tape as they study, they learn more effectively. I was one of the volunteers who read textbooks on tape. All the retired folks always had dibs on the literature texts. Because I was unintimidated by the science texts, those fell to me. At first, I compulsively reviewed the texts and noted points where I might stumble, but the sheer volume of the assignments soon made that impossible. So I cold-read chemistry, statistics, and physiology texts. I wasn’t always letter-perfect. In fact, when I stumbled, I would just say, “oops, let me try that again,” re-read the sentence, and keep going. Nevertheless, I got nice notes from several of the students, who reported that a voice adding meaning to the words on the page helped them enormously. It is indeed exhausting work.