Weekend Ramble
No Comment
As you might have noticed, comments are disabled the past few days--a temporary condition, I trust. While I don't get many these days, your responses matter, and being effectively DEAF to hearing what you say makes what I say seem sort of like silly talking-to-myself. And especially this morning as I don't seem to have much to say anyway. So consider this the "morning pages" done for the sake of keeping the writing muscles flexed and fingers in practice at the keyboard.
No Dates
I've entered a bit of empty space on the book-talk calendar, with nothing scheduled for the rest of the month. Early December, I'll be keeping a table at Chateau Morrisette a few hours on a couple of open-house Saturdays. In February, I might be doing one or more presentations back in Wytheville, still TBA and also for a Roanoke writers' group. And maybe in March (still waiting to hear) there's the Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, where I submitted SRH a few months ago. April, I'll do some version of the book talk in Birmingham for my mom's Sunday School class and will repeat the photomemoir for a Roanoke church group as The Virginia State Parks visitors center is considering the book for 2007, as is the Blue Ridge Parkway I just heard this week. So some good things happening, but at present, they are scattered across a rather long expanse of months.
No Mistakes
Speaking of the book, dear readers: I'm getting close to thinking in very specific terms about a second printing. Here's where you come in. I'd like, of course, to expunge the new books of the old errors. If you have found the punctuation, deleted word, verb tense errors that lurk(in reasonably small number) in your copy of the book, do me a huge favor and send page number and a quick descriptor of the mistake. I'd be forever in your debt. I will also plan to include a Table of Contents to guide the reader to any specific piece in the book, and may make changes to the back cover text. That shouldn't be hard to do.
No Cat
Hard choice, but unavoidable: I'll have to take the cat to the vet to put her down. She has gone from partially to completely blind this week. An outside cat, I can't stand the thought of her freezing to death because she can't find her box on the porch, or being eaten by a fox or bobcat in her own yard because she could find her usual hiding place. I've taken badly injured family cats over the hill in a burlap bag and euthanized them with a shotgun back in the old days, but I can't even think of doing that for CJ after 16 years, as unaffectionate and plain an old cat as she was.
No Sound Editor
I'm looking to spend some money (as little as possible of course) for an audio editor after finding that free open-source Audacity doesn't work with the sound files from the radio station. My needs are simple; no multitrack special effects here, just cut-and-paste, fade in, normalization and such of the 7 hours of reading of Slow Road Home. I'll need to listen through it all, mark those pieces that need to be re-recorded, add musical bullets between pieces, some ambient sounds (like water falls to the Ann's Falls piece, for instance) and such as that. Anybody got ideas? Sound Forge? Audition?