Issues with Audio

As avid readers of this blog (who he?) will know, I have been experimenting with audio. I managed to upload A Christmas Ghost Story to Soundcloud and that went quite well.  The quality seems ok, via Audacity, a reasonable soundcard in my PC (installing for playing Dungeons and Dragons online...) and the Blue Yeti microphone, which is lovely.

The issue I have is that we live by a road. It's an old house with shutters but only single glazed windows so it doesn't keep the noise out. Mostly it's road noise but also dogs, kids, drunken people and earlier in the year the enormous row of seagulls. We live by the sea.

You can do some fancy things with Audacity to edit out the noise where it falls between speech ("in the gaps" to you) but sometimes you can hear it behind the speech. I went up to the back bedroom away from the road, using a borrowed laptop but in fact the laptop's sound card wasn't as good so the sound was tinny. Also I was getting wind noise (from the wind, not me) and kids and dogs.

Sheila's suggestion is that I wear a quilt over my head. And you know, that's not so silly. I mean it will look silly, but I think the deadened, dampened sound (I had to explain what I meant when I talked about dampening a sound to Sheila, but then I was a drummer in a punk band once, so I used to damp my bass drum all the time. With a quilt as it turns out.)

So learning points from this post:

1. Wear quilt over head.
2. Audition as a narrator to make fortune.
3. Post picture of where I live so you can get an idea of the seagull problem.

Erotic Tingles and How They're connected to my Story for Halloween.

Well I've just finished the first draft of my Story for Halloween. I swear down, I've been walking into spider webs for the past two days. I like the shape of it. I knew each scene before I began to write and they just went into the old scrivener - 5 scenes of a 1000 words each. Though in fact it's ended up as just over 7k, so that doesn't work out. Never mind arithmetic wasn't my strong point.

But, as the young folk say, I'm pumped. I think it's really good and I was scared when I was writing it. I remember reading an article on the Internet thing by someone who wrote erotica who said that what you write has to have the requisite effect on the writer before he/she can hope to have that effect on the reader. I don't know how he ever finished a story is all I can say.

I remember when I lived on my own before the arrival of the blessed Sheila and after the departure of the sainted twin daughters, I would be sitting writing spooky stories and I would get the tingle of fear up my spine and look warily over my shoulder. Every creak made me jump.

I'm only glad I wasn't writing porn.

Synchronicity.

So last night my lovely daughter came to visit me with her cat, Dylan. Dylan's house has a flea problem through no fault of his own. He came to visit me while they let off some toxic smoke bomb. We watched Imperium, which was quite good actually. Harry Potter even sounded properly American, to my untutored ears anyhow.

I took the opportunity of outlining my new story - A Story for Halloween - (just sayin', not pluggin' - it ain't even writ yet). Without letting go any major spoilers like white icebergs of truth floating over an ocean of uncertainty, I can merely hint that it contains a spider. So, anyway, wind on an hour or two until Imperium has finished, Dylan is getting restless and night has fallen. I open to door to let out my modern Miss and guess what - a spider has spun a beautiful web across my door. I open the door and there he is, eye-level with me and his web a geometric wonder. He sat right in the middle like a prince. And I thought - hot damn! That surely is a synchronous sign that this story, of all stories, the spider one, is going to be the ka-boom best.  I can probably retire on the proceeds. The spider told me.

You heard it here first.

Lay versus Lie and the lies they tell about it.

"Lay, lady, lay - lay across by big brass bed..."  That is not an invitation, but a lyric by Bob Dylan. Let us go further.  "Lay down, Sally, and rest you in my arms..."  sang Eric Clapton.  "Lay your sleeping head my love, human on my faithless arm..."  wrote W H Auden.  

At the risk of weakening my case, I will note here that these are in the second person imperative.  Grammarist  says that the difference between lie and lay is that lay needs an object - you lay something (I titter a little here and perhaps snigger), and you lie yourself. That is lie is instransitive, while lay is necessarily a transitive verb. 

But this is one of those modern distinctions created by Grammarians. While I am a good boy and obey the rules, we should know that historically and colloquially, there is no such clear distinction between lie and lay and they are merely variants. 

Let's look at Psalm 4, verse 8, in the King James Bible where it says - 

 I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.

Technically you could argue that here (and with the Auden quote above) there is an object - namely "me" (or in Auden "your sleeping head".) But to the ordinary Joe and Jane it sounds pretty much like I am "laying down" - "I lay down".

In Anglo-Saxon, lie was licgan which Bosworth-Toller list as meaning "to be in a prostrate or recumbent position" [not prostate - careful! Reminds me of St Pancreas that too)] while lay was lecgan "to cause to take a horizontal position".  I think this is exactly what Slowhand had in mind for Sally.  

If you're like me you are already seeing that these two verbs weren't orginally two verbs at all, but one! And it's to do with umlaut. It always is with Anglo Saxon.  But when I look I see that as well as Anglo-Saxon licgan and lecgan, we have Gothic ligan and lagyan and German liegen and legen (I note with interest that the word law is also from this root *lagu - that which is layed down).  Unhelpfully for me, it seems the Germanic languages are preserving the difference between lie and lay. The online Etymological dictionary gives me some succour in that it notes that the root of both these words is the Primitive Indo-European *leghe- meaning both lie and lay. So before the pesky primitive Germanics differentiated them, they were the same word. And that differentiation was probably the decision some old Germanic pedant in a marsh somewhere in Friesland, or Gotland. Not Kent, certainly, it was before they got to Kent. 

I am helped also by Peter Trudgill in his Dialect Matters: Respecting Vernacular Language, p 51 (Cambridge University Press) where he discusses lie versus lay.  He says that the umlaut change (though he does not dare mention umlaut) between lie and lay to create a difference between doing something yourself and causing something else to do that action was preserved in other pairs such as Middle English sink versus sench "cause to sink". Don't worry about the palatalisation of the -k, just take my word for it it's the same word. He also mentions his Norfolk dialect distinction between sit and set -  where people will ask you to "set down..."  But Trudgill says "the distinction between lie and lay is being lost in most forms of English"   Yes! Hooray!

This rant was caused by a person reviewing my ebook The Haunting. (Yes I know I just plugged that) and saying I was illiterate because my main guy talks about someone laying on the bed. In his first person vernacular speech. Most of us don't talk like Government reports lady!   Not when we're about to be eaten by monsters!!! Sheesh. Now, I know this might reflect on me badly, going to such length to defend this. And I don't even mind criticism.

A's gaan for a lig doon, noo. (as we would say)

My First Audio Book

For the longest time (as they say), those who know and love me have said, "My my Tony, you have such a lovely voice, could we have a recording of it?"

This may not be strictly what they said, but the gist was plain. After some humming, and a little hawing, and a non-trivial amount of havering I got a Yeti Blue USB microphone. I have spent the last few days messing around with this.

I have a number of discoveries to report. Firstly, I always knew that reading my writing aloud helped with rhythm and flow. You just gotta get the cadences right. And then when I was reading out loud for recording, it really helped me refine the flow of the written word.  So that was one thing.

The next thing was that my front room is incredibly noisy. I didn't even know. The traffic sound from outside is stupidly loud. Why are they driving past my house anyway? Then this morning some kind of light aircraft buzzed the house. I was sitting with the curtains drawn and shutters shut, but still it must have known I was in there.  Also children running by. Adults swearing. Then the headphones give a little buzz every now and again. I know I'm writing in fragments and some of the more punctilious readers of my books say they don't like fragments but that's another post. Cormac McCarthy does them, Charles Dickens did them. I can do them.  I have been dipping into a great book by the way - The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth - and he says it's ok to use fragments (not in so many words). So I will continue to use fragments.

Anyway, that was a digression from the audio book. My front room is not the perfect studio. It will not be able to produce sound files of sufficient quality (that is with no background noise) so that I can upload audiobooks via Amazon. I'd like to do that and I am scouting another studio. I am thinking of my mother's airing cupboard. I said that to her and she says, "Do you want all the linen and clothes in there?" I replied, "Most certainly; they will damp shit down."

Also, I now see a future stretching ahead of me as a voice narrator. Apparently you can make tons of money narrating other peoples' books. Mind you they might not want my Northern English accent. I noticed I dropped a few Ts and a couple of Hs. Although I can see a new genre of gritty Northern smut being narrated:

"Eh up, our Ethel. Get tha' kit off, sharpish."
"Weel, hinny, ah nivver kna'd ye cared, like. Eh, divvn't dee that!"

I have been practising my Dumfries-shire accent too. The main character would have to be called Ken, ye ken? And everything would happen "the noo".

But I digress again. What was I saying? Audiobooks! The new future. I am cautious about most stuff these days, but where there's an airing cupboard there's a way, as my auld mam says.

Oh, yeah - a link to my soundcloud audio book:

A Christmas Ghost Story

It's about 25 minutes long .... and FREE!!!!

Give Away Book!

I worked out how to make a book giveaway and add it to my blog. It was staring at me in the face all the time. I had tried to add links to my Facebook page (failed). I had tried for ages to get a perma-free Kindle Book. The old way was to make your book free on another site and then point to it and say to Amazon - look! This is free! Match the price!

Well, I tried that and got a very pleasant response from Amazon saying they reserved the right to match price and in this instance they chose not to. That's fair enough.

Anyway, I had a book free on Smashword - The House of Bones - and Smashwords allowed me to make a gadget that I could post into my blogger page. Feel free to download the free book. I hope you like it. I did.

Facebook Pages

I just added a facebook author page. I was using my normal facebook page but I thought that ultimately I would be annoying people who were not interested in my writing and I had thought it was neater to create a separate "author" page.  So far so good.

I have added a Good Reads tab to the page so people can see the books and reviews. I wanted to add a blog feed to the page, and it seemed that there was a way of doing this up until at least 2014 through the app Notes, however this no longer seems to work. Or at least I can't get it to work.

I also wanted to be able to give away a free story. I might still be able to do that. I will report back later if it works (or in fact if it doesn't)