LibriVox: Victory...and Thwarting

Despite a slew of technical issues, from my mic and Audacity and my net, I fought on, and the Count has now been staked. I got Chapter 27 up to the catalogue on Friday. :D

I have some new poetry additions, most recently, "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman and "Lament of the Irish Emigrant" by Helen Selina, Lady Dufferin.

My mic was giving me trouble. Lots of it. It's taken to nearly constant clicking and drops. Sigh. I have no idea why. It used to do it now and then, but now....whoa. Yesterday, I tried to buy a new mic. This was not easy, the selection is beyond limited. I picked the most likely one and brought it home.

It doesn't work.

It records my voice as though it's been folded through an 80s synthesizer, and I was speaking across the room, and it creates an immense buzzing background. This was *not* the cheapest mic, and it featured 'noise cancelling' blah blah, which as it turns out, means we will try to get rid of your voice. *insert eye rolling here*

So I'm back to my crappy mic and endless snippet re-records. I have to do my readings in paragraphs, then save them, edit them, and redo phrases where there were clicks and drops, until I can piece together a 'clean' recording. This means it takes me 6 hours to record a chapter that would take me 20 minutes to just read outright. I know this exactly. I've timed it.

It sucks. It's a pure fun killer.

But I love books, and I'll try to keep going, if time and patience allows. Huge if, but we'll see.

Last night, I recorded The Junior Classics [vol 1] - by William Patten - Chap 82: Beauty and the Beast. 6 hrs to record and edit. The final version runs at a bit over a half hour, as I have to break the reading into itty bits, with lots of pauses, so I can hope to drop phrases in and out when I have to try to force a clean bit. Every phrase needs dozens of attempts, until accidentally, one comes out clean. Very tedious, and a fairly unnatural way to read, but I'll have to get used to it, if I want to keep contributing.

Librivox: Dracula

I was set to finish Dracula tonight. I was so close. Only two sections left of the chapter. An enormous Mina section, and a Jonathan quickie. But I thought I could do it. I at least thought I could get Mina. I was focused.

I did my section, and at THE VERY MOMENT when I went to hit save, Audacity went, and I quote, CRASH, and threw FOUR HOURS of work into oblivion.

Mina's whole journal entry, the entire ending of the book, gone.

Oh yeah, I'm at a loss for words. :(

Haha.

I tried to recover it somehow, but you just can't do that with Audacity. The temp files are just random snatches, with the snippets in random order.

Sigh.

My focus beast wants to start right over, right now, but my reason beast knows that's a bad idea for so many reasons.

Maybe tomorrow.

But I need to get some writing done first. I ditched it for Dracula today...*shakes fist at evil coding*

'Hill's Gate'

© 2005 Marlo Dianne.
Original nature photography.
A barred metal gate, a barren snowy field, and a majestic New Brunswick hill, under a blistery winter sky.

Print Available.
(preview pixelation brought to you by Picasa)

'Crisp'

© 2005 Marlo Dianne.
Original nature photography.
Trees, bent low in respect of an ice storm, in Late December.

Print Available.
(preview pixelation brought to you by Picasa)

Acceptance: "Id"

My flash story, "Id", has been accepted and is scheduled to appear June 30th in Raven Electrick.

DANG you, CBC

It's now an hour after their scheduled 3hr coverage of the Olympics, and STILL no skating. ARGH!

Instead, the sat updated the time block, and now it's more coverage til 2am, during which it says skating will be on. I need to spork someone.

I just gave up and hit record on my VCR and turned off the tv. If they bother to actually air it in the next 6 hrs, I can watch it tomorrow. Anal perforations.

Of course, for all this, it will prolly suck. Sigh.

And the wind is really picking up outside, so we could lose the power now anyway, and...Double sigh.

Although, no matter what, this time round no one can curse a French judge. They can't. All the judges are anonymous and completely unaccountable! Brilliant!

I wrote the Grimm summary in the scatter time. Of course, if I had KNOWN they would do this, I could have had the tv off all that time and been actually working.

I think I'm going to stop trying to watch. It's bad for my blood pressure.

UPDATE: 6 hrs of tape, 9 hrs of single-day olympics coverage total. Ice dancing never appeared.

LibriVox: More Dracula

I had some tech difficulties along the way, but I finally got Chapter 26 done and uploaded. With me now:

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Great chapter, good fun. Even with my mic and net working against me :P

Now for 27!

But I snagged an orphan among Aesop's Fables tonight, The Lamp. It was just a tiny little pathetic lonely thing, and it was the last one to finish the collection, so who could resist it?

Plus, I am going crazy with the Olympic coverage. I'm half listening to it now. It's in the other room, and I'm here, where I can't kick the tv.

See, they're like repairmen. Worse, contractors. The rumour is that skating will be on, but nobody will tell you FOR SURE or WHEN, and it's three hours or more of frickin coverage, and then it's time-shifted across a good dozen channels. You never know if it will be on AT ALL. I tried flipping around the other night, trying to find the man's long program somewhere before I slipped into a coma, and then suddenly, there it was, and I had no idea how much I missed, and I had to record it later in the early hours of the AM, just to be sure. And then it turned out I only missed a bit of Robotic Boy's start. They didn't air most of the skaters. WTF?

And tonight, Ice Dancing, but it's been on for 2 and a bloody half hours, of a three hour time slot, and there's not been even a frickin mention of skates...Nothing! *shakes fist* What is CBC *DOING*?

Of course, I still miss Elvis. They have no Elvis. So what can I really miss? But still. I hated being twarted.

I love orphans though. 'specially when someone leaves me Dracula...*rubs hands in manic glee*

Ew. Ick. Gross.

I got spam yesterday. Postal spam. Wait, wait, your gag reflex is not going to be disappointed...

I got it from a market. A market who did NOT respond to my submission back in November. I had dismissed them as likely deadbeats, but this...

The huge wad they sent includes, among its gruesome, a frantic offer to buy a diary emblazened with their magazine name, and a rabid urging to enter their contests--their entry fees are our actual income contests.

Spammers and scammers. Joy.

I was going to tape it up and mark it with a big curt RETURN TO SENDER. Then I realised, I can't. The bastards are on to that. They don't have their addy on the outside of the envelope.

I had forgot in my revulsion that when I picked the mail up, I had no idea who sent me a letter from England (the Royal Mail stamp).

See, the weirdest part is I esubbed them. I esub everyone. I haven't done postal, period, in more than five years. But they spent 1 pound, 12 pence to send me this shit.

Oh, and twist the blade down your throat: they spelled my name wrong. Of course, they somehow copy and pasted my addy wrong too, but the name is *personal*. Like getting that launched gob of congealing spit right in your face.

Blog Redux

I just spent the whole day redesigning my blog. Literally, the whole day, more than 8 hrs fighting code. It seemed so sweetly simple in theory. I just wanted to switch to three columns.

Well.

The insanity.

It was the uber-mess, of course. Every time I got one dang thing sort of working, three other things would hopelessly break. Things kept trying to overlap, or disappear, or jab each other with rusty edges, or vent snarking things about my dna.

(That last bit was well deserved; my dna is infamous misery)

But what I lack in mad skills I make up for in unrelenting illogical determination, a rabid need to never ever give in, to deny reality to its bitter end, which, of course, is how I manage to survive in this cruel bitter Windows world.

Anyway, it appears to be working, on my system. Firefox hasn't burst into flames, sobbing pitifully with whimpering cries into the night. That was this afternoon. A do-over would be boring.

So, new design. Glowing in the sun, or fit to be staked? Please chime in and let me know what you think.

LibriVox: Poetry

I adopted more Dracula orphans--Yea me!--and I'm into Chapter 26 and its awesomeness, but I couldn't resist a taste of poetry this morning. It called me just as strong as my homemade pumpkin cheesecake, and I had it for breakfast. :)

So today was for "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold and "The Song my Paddle Sings" by E. Pauline Johnson.

Which, now that I think about it, is like Hope and Hopeless. :D

The Snow Spider

It's not that I miss snow, you understand. I hate snow. I'm happy when it fails to fall. Still. It's creepy.

I had to catch and release a spider this morning. That's so wrong, I shuddered anew, and it had nothing to do with arachnids.

LibriVox: Dracula

I just finished my Dracula orphan, Chapter 9. It's being converted to mp3 as we speak.

Orphans are chapters whose volunteers have bailed, usually right at the deadline. This leaves the book with silent gaps, stranded, until other volunteers jump into the breach. I try to rescue orphans as my priority, because it will keep the books coming :)

Dracula has a slew of orphans, which is really puzzling. Yes, the chapters are long, but they're quite doable, as long as you break it up into chunks over a week or so.

Or maybe they're let down by the material. When I first peered into Dracula as I kid, I was terribly disappointed. A series of letters! What crud! And yeah, it's usually a conceit that's boring and dreadfully done, but I don't think Stoker totally botched it here ;)

Publication: "A Breath of Power" @ AlienSkin

A Breath of Power