Bertie and the old fairy queen

The old fairy queen hasn't admitted to having a name yet. Bertie is Arabella's brother. The old queen in their paternal grandmother.

recording test

This afternoon I drove up to Cambria to see if my voice will work for the audio book of J2M.

It was the first time Rick and I had met in person, so we chatted for a few minutes as we walked around to the studio, which takes up two small rooms above his garage.

Inside, I got settled on the couch with the text in front of me on a music stand. It took some some time to get the microphone just right. Then Rick went into the other room where his equipment is and I could see him putting on the headphones through the window. He signaled me to start reading.

Reading was much harder than I anticipated! I've read the beginning of this book aloud hundreds of times, but recording is a whole new game. For a start, there's no need to project your voice. The microphone is inches away and it catches everything, including the little pops of the p's and the sibilance of the s's and the sigh when you flub a line for the third time.

Reading for a recording is more like acting than reading. You have to give the characters unique voices, even if you don't "do voices," you have read slowly enough for the readers to absorb the dense imagery in the beginning of the book, and, if you are me, you have to modulate the long a's so nobody can tell you're from Philadelphia. (I didn't even know I said words like "nasty" in such a nasty way!)

We worked at it for a couple hours, recording two chapters in the end. It's clear that I'm going to have to practice (a lot!) to do this right, but I think we both feel that my voice will work in the end. I have some homework: to get a man and another woman (with a lower voice than mine) to do an informal reading of the same material so we can compare. If I like either one better, we'll try to find a professional actor to do the reading.

Rick gave me a copy of today's reading on a CD and I popped it into the car player on the way home. Some of those a's really made me cringe, but you know? All in all, it doesn't sound too bad.

Right now I think this is going to work!

Arabella's entrance

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ARABELLA

The rope snaps as Magellan’s teeth clamp down, and the raft is free. The river’s rapid current doesn’t hesitate to make its claim, and the little craft moves along so quickly that even if the rats had noticed, they couldn’t have caught it. Magellan is elated! I did it, he crows inwardly. I’m free! The river banks rush by swiftly as he bobs and weaves over stones and leaves, smiling for the first time in goodness knows how long.

He is still tied to the board, of course, and he doesn’t know how his wing is doing, pinned into its makeshift split, but the river’s energy is contagious. If he can bite through the rope that tied him to shore, the equus decides, he can bite through the ones holding him fast to the board, too.

If he can reach them.

Magellan is bending over to see if he can get the rope near his fetlock into his mouth when the raft stops abruptly, caught in a tangle of leaves and twigs caused by a low-hanging branch. Magellan’s splinted wing dips into into the water before the board rights itself again. Wet leaves close in on him from behind as his raft pushes against more leaves and sticks. He is trapped again. He shudders.

A gentle melody is winding its way through the wetness, but Magellan doesn’t notice.

“Yuchh!” he cries aloud, very cold and miserable.

The music stops.

“What is it? Are you okay?” a voice calls from above him.

Magellan looks up. He can see that someone is perched in the branches, a human. No, it can’t be a human. Humans are impossibly large in this world. This person is the right size.

“No!” he answers. “Not at all! I am most certainly not okay! You can see for yourself that I’m tied down with ropes!”

The fairy, for that’s what Arabella is, hangs her fiddle over a leaf, hitches up her skirt, and scrambles to the end of her branch. “Oh! I can see that now!” she cries. “Gracious, how did that happen to you? I’ll be right down!”

And then she is gone. Magellan can’t tell if she skittered down the tree or just vanished into the air.

But before he can finish wondering, Arabella is back, leaping from branch to branch in her feathery shoes, her leaf pinafore billowing around her. She crouches beside the equus and looks at him curiously. Pushing her spiky rust-colored hair from her eyes and cocking her head, she says, “What are you? I’ve never met anyone anything like you before! Do you have a name?”

“Of course I have a name! Don’t you? Is this a place where creatures don’t have names?”

“Oh my, you are a stranger! Everyone has a name here. Mine is Arabella Acorn. And what is yours?” She is talking as she works at undoing the knots in the rope. One is undone quickly and then the next, and Magellan can move both his forelegs.

“Magellan, my name is Magellan. You may have heard of a mortal with the same name, but it was mine first, and, of course, I have flown around the world too many...” but he doesn’t finish, because the ropes on his rear legs are already undone.

Arabella puts her hand on his flank. “Don’t try to get up yet!” she says. “The raft will tip!” So he lies still on the board, and begins his story from the moment he found himself in Ivan’s backpack, while the fairy finishes untying the ropes and then gives his limbs a much-needed rub.

He is only up to the part about the rats when she interrupts. “I’ve secured the ropes to the big branch now. Try to get up carefully. Take my hand in your teeth if you like.”

Magellan looks at the delicate tawny brown hand she is offering and neighs "no, thanks."

Very slowly, he begins to shift his weight. He lifts one leg and wonders where he can put it to bear weight.

Then, splash! The raft tips sideways, and Magellan is in the water, his leg and both wings caught in the leaves and branches.

Arabella calls out, “Oh, Magellan!” so loudly that her whole family, who’d been gathering berries and mushrooms just up the river bank, come running.

Arabella

I made her as a gift for a friend, but she wanted to be in the new Mythaca book before she even had her shoes on.

considering a recording

Months ago, at the urging of some of the home school folks I've been working with, I investigated the possibility of doing a recording of Journey to Mythaca. One of the joys of living halfway between LA and San Francisco is that some very interesting people retire here. I was delighted to make contact with an ex-Apple engineer with a small recording studio who was instantly enthusiastic about the project.

We set a date for a test recording to see if my voice would be suitable for recording. If it turned out not to be, we'd start looking for an actor who might do it cheap or even free for the experience. Then those heavy, heavy rains came, and the little studio was flooded.

Now the repairs are done, and we have a new appointment on Wednesday to do the test recording.

All those years I taught school, read-aloud was my favorite part of the day. Now, doing readings at schools is one of the great joys in my life. I read everything I write aloud, whether I have an audience or not. But it's not about being a practiced reader this time; it's about some quality in my voice that will be right or not right.

Now I'm off to print out all the pages I plan to read in size 14 font, as Rick, the engineer, suggested.

We'll see how it all unfolds.

Negative synchronicity

What else can you call it?

Shana and I prepared for a Mapping Mythaca workshop last Friday over a period of months, making materials, painted paper and cut out images for collages, paper soaked in tea for maps, I practiced the stories I planned to tell, chose the parts of Journey to Mythaca that I wanted to read, I called the person organizing it, emailed back and forth, drove five hours to get there...and the charter school sponsoring the workshop had a board meeting the night before that lasted till the middle of the night (no doubt till the exact moment that I woke up with a cramp in my foot and had to walk around the living room until it went away), the director left with half the families, and not one kid from the school showed up for the workshop the next day. Actually one kid did show up, but he wasn't from the school. What are the odds of that?

We did the workshop with the boy and his mother, which was fun, and then we went to see a friend who lives in the area. It was an adventure - an unexpected little vacation.

As if to drive home the lesson (be ready for abrupt changes in plans?) as thoroughly as possible, this was the third big negative synchronicity in my life over the past few weeks: three events that could be considered losses because of exceptionally unlikely circumstances that were so out of my control that I can only shake my head and laugh about it.

I wondered whether it would go on, and if perhaps I should stop trying to do workshops, but I had a classroom visit scheduled for Tuesday this week, and you know what? It went really well. I had lots of materials left from the non-workshop on Friday, and the kids loved the book and and the artwork.

And when I came home, I found two good emails. One said that a local magazine would be running a review of the book in July. Local publicity! Hurray! I'd been working on a new set of questions for book groups, so I put those together in a brochure and took them down to the local independent bookstore. Jim was there and was pleased to get the brochures, setting them right up at the cash register. And now we have a signing set up for the first week in July, right when the review comes out.


The second was from the fellow I began working with months ago to make a recording of Journey to Mythaca. We'd been ready to go when his studio flooded in the heavy rain we had in March. Now he is ready to begin again.

I think of synchronicity as an opening to Kairos, the world of once-upon-a-time. Kairos, by its nature isn't reliable. I guess that's the point.