When I was doing a lot of media work back in the 90s, a common mantra in the industry was that “Kids and animals make good television” (We might also add that they apparently inspire grammatically questionable mantras, but that’s a different matter.) As I’ve been recording my novel, Getting Fixed, for free (!) downloading from this site, I’ve come up with another mantra: Animals make challenging recording. Admittedly its grammar is equally suspect, but it pretty well sums up what’s been going on in my office for the last 6 weeks.
For someone who has never done any recording, recording in a no-brainer. You plug the microphone/headset into the appropriate port on the computer and go at it. Once you record for a minute or so, you realize there’s a bit more to it than you thought. But above and beyond the technology and whatever it is in my headset or brain that makes the former shrink or the latter swell such that, after about an hour of recording I feel like my brain is being cut in half, there are the pets.
I don’t know about your pets, but my pets are not used to me talking to no one. If there are no other humans in the house and I am talking, then I must be talking to them. Thus the first animal-related challenge associated with recording was to convince the dogs that I was not talking to them and would they please just ignore me because I wanted to finish this chapter before my brain swelled up and the headset cut it in half and reduced me to a vegetable which could, conceivably, compromise their standard of living.
Of course, I’m sure all of you dog-owners immediately recognize the problem: Teaching a dog to ignore you when you’re talking is normally not considered a smart thing to do. On the other hand, it hampers quality recording enormously if every time you open your mouth, two little dogs come rushing over to see what you want and an old dog groans as he repositions himself in his bed so he can see what’s going on. At this point you will discover, as I did, that those jangling rabies tags and licenses and happy little dog noises can make it sound like your main character is living in an animal shelter instead of a remote farmhouse.
To solve this problem, I tried recording using a tone of voice that would not alert the dogs, but that resulted in a drone so dull it threatened to put me to sleep along with the dogs, to say nothing of anyone who listened to the recording. Not a good thing. Fortunately, fate proposed a solution to this problem. Because I was making so many mistakes at the beginning, I had to record the same sections over and over again, to the point that the dogs came to associate my putting on the headset with nap time.
While that was an improvement, it didn’t completely solve my recording problems. For reasons known strictly to herself, BeeBee the deaf corgi periodically comes rocketing out from under my desk where she sleeps, barking at God-knows-what. She’s always done this but, take it from me, this really puts a real crimp in a recording session. Such explosions result in recorded sequences such as “…and then he handed the paper to…Bark, bark, bark!!!!…What the? …BeeBee stop that! Get over here!” which she, of course, ignores because she can’t hear, but which sets the other two dogs off. Then I smarten up and wave my hand to get Bee’s attention, she realizes I’m not pleased, and retreats back under the desk. Then all of the dogs settle down again following the aforementioned great jangling of licenses and rabies tags and I try to remember where I was before all this happened.
Even though the dogs fairly quickly learned to ignore the conversational tone I use when reading descriptive parts of the book, dialogue is a different matter entirely. And there’s a fair amount of dialogue in the book, some of it angry, some sad, some startled or frightened. I considered the quadrupedal response to my shouted literary, “What?!” pretty dramatic until I saw that to an even more energetic, “Stop!!!!” In the latter case, the cat (who had been monitoring the recording session unbeknownst to me) shot out of his hiding place in the cupboard and flew down the stairs while Frica and Watson woke into full alertness like shell-shocked soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and BeeBee barked in the high, screechy bark she uses when she wants to be part of something but is clueless regarding what it is.
A third recording challenge comes in feline form. For me, that means Whittington the cat. Unlike the dogs who function primarily as makers-of-noise-at-inappropriate-times, Whit believes that dogs are the greatest cat toys ever invented and even at 13 can summon the energy for a game of “Scare the Canines.” Like many cats, he favors sneak attacks. When he isn’t lurking in the cupboard while I’m recording, sometimes he creeps silently and invisibly into the office when the little dogs are sound asleep under my desk. Then he slithers into the tiny space behind the desk and pounces on them. This results in much snarling and growling under the desk, followed by Frica making a mad dash down the stairs after Whit while BeeBee and Watson the hound bark encouragement and I try to control the urge to sell the whole lot of them to a laboratory where they’ll make them smoke cigarettes or listen to Elvis singing, “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” 24/7.
Once I regain my composure, I get everyone settled again, massage the dent out of my skull, delete ten minutes of x-rated recording, and start over.
Now you would think that trying to record under such circumstances is a fool’s errand and that, if I had any brains not squished by the headset, I’d lock the whole furry lot of them in the basement or bathroom and do my recording in peace. But the reality is that for as frustrating as it can be at times, in my attempts to ensure a serene recording environment I’ve discovered a lot about my animals’ behavior, their habits, and their most subtle body language cues that I never noticed before. Simultaneously, they’re gradually figuring out that what I say when I’m wearing the headset has a different meaning from my saying those same words and expressions when I’m not.
I’m sure that by the time I finish recording the book—and especially those climactic final chapters—I will have learned even more about them, myself, and our relationships with each other. But as long as the delete function keeps working in the recording program and my brain resumes its normal contour after I remove the headset, I look forward to it.
To download the prologue and first chapter of Getting Fixed, click here.
When I was doing a lot of media work back in the 90s, a common mantra in the industry was that “Kids and animals make good television” (We might also add that they apparently inspire grammatically questionable mantras, but that’s a different matter.) As I’ve been recording my novel, Getting Fixed, for free (!) downloading from this site, I’ve come up with another mantra: Animals make challenging recording. Admittedly its grammar is equally suspect, but it pretty well sums up what’s been going on in my office for the last 6 weeks.
For someone who has never done any recording, recording in a no-brainer. You plug the microphone/headset into the appropriate port on the computer and go at it. Once you record for a minute or so, you realize there’s a bit more to it than you thought. But above and beyond the technology and whatever it is in my headset or brain that makes the former shrink or the latter swell such that, after about an hour of recording I feel like my brain is being cut in half, there are the pets.
I don’t know about your pets, but my pets are not used to me talking to no one. If there are no other humans in the house and I am talking, then I must be talking to them. Thus the first animal-related challenge associated with recording was to convince the dogs that I was not talking to them and would they please just ignore me because I wanted to finish this chapter before my brain swelled up and the headset cut it in half and reduced me to a vegetable which could, conceivably, compromise their standard of living.
Of course, I’m sure all of you dog-owners immediately recognize the problem: Teaching a dog to ignore you when you’re talking is normally not considered a smart thing to do. On the other hand, it hampers quality recording enormously if every time you open your mouth, two little dogs come rushing over to see what you want and an old dog groans as he repositions himself in his bed so he can see what’s going on. At this point you will discover, as I did, that those jangling rabies tags and licenses and happy little dog noises can make it sound like your main character is living in an animal shelter instead of a remote farmhouse.
To solve this problem, I tried recording using a tone of voice that would not alert the dogs, but that resulted in a drone so dull it threatened to put me to sleep along with the dogs, to say nothing of anyone who listened to the recording. Not a good thing. Fortunately, fate proposed a solution to this problem. Because I was making so many mistakes at the beginning, I had to record the same sections over and over again, to the point that the dogs came to associate my putting on the headset with nap time.
While that was an improvement, it didn’t completely solve my recording problems. For reasons known strictly to herself, BeeBee the deaf corgi periodically comes rocketing out from under my desk where she sleeps, barking at God-knows-what. She’s always done this but, take it from me, this really puts a real crimp in a recording session. Such explosions result in recorded sequences such as “…and then he handed the paper to…Bark, bark, bark!!!!…What the? …BeeBee stop that! Get over here!” which she, of course, ignores because she can’t hear, but which sets the other two dogs off. Then I smarten up and wave my hand to get Bee’s attention, she realizes I’m not pleased, and retreats back under the desk. Then all of the dogs settle down again following the aforementioned great jangling of licenses and rabies tags and I try to remember where I was before all this happened.
Even though the dogs fairly quickly learned to ignore the conversational tone I use when reading descriptive parts of the book, dialogue is a different matter entirely. And there’s a fair amount of dialogue in the book, some of it angry, some sad, some startled or frightened. I considered the quadrupedal response to my shouted literary, “What?!” pretty dramatic until I saw that to an even more energetic, “Stop!!!!” In the latter case, the cat (who had been monitoring the recording session unbeknownst to me) shot out of his hiding place in the cupboard and flew down the stairs while Frica and Watson woke into full alertness like shell-shocked soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and BeeBee barked in the high, screechy bark she uses when she wants to be part of something but is clueless regarding what it is.
A third recording challenge comes in feline form. For me, that means Whittington the cat. Unlike the dogs who function primarily as makers-of-noise-at-inappropriate-times, Whit believes that dogs are the greatest cat toys ever invented and even at 13 can summon the energy for a game of “Scare the Canines.” Like many cats, he favors sneak attacks. When he isn’t lurking in the cupboard while I’m recording, sometimes he creeps silently and invisibly into the office when the little dogs are sound asleep under my desk. Then he slithers into the tiny space behind the desk and pounces on them. This results in much snarling and growling under the desk, followed by Frica making a mad dash down the stairs after Whit while BeeBee and Watson the hound bark encouragement and I try to control the urge to sell the whole lot of them to a laboratory where they’ll make them smoke cigarettes or listen to Elvis singing, “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” 24/7.
Once I regain my composure, I get everyone settled again, massage the dent out of my skull, delete ten minutes of x-rated recording, and start over.
Now you would think that trying to record under such circumstances is a fool’s errand and that, if I had any brains not squished by the headset, I’d lock the whole furry lot of them in the basement or bathroom and do my recording in peace. But the reality is that for as frustrating as it can be at times, in my attempts to ensure a serene recording environment I’ve discovered a lot about my animals’ behavior, their habits, and their most subtle body language cues that I never noticed before. Simultaneously, they’re gradually figuring out that what I say when I’m wearing the headset has a different meaning from my saying those same words and expressions when I’m not.
I’m sure that by the time I finish recording the book—and especially those climactic final chapters—I will have learned even more about them, myself, and our relationships with each other. But as long as the delete function keeps working in the recording program and my brain resumes its normal contour after I remove the headset, I look forward to it.
To download the prologue and first chapter of Getting Fixed, click here.