Creating a monster

Brad Nelson has created a monster. A couple of weeks ago he asked me if I would be willing to make a recording of myself reading Bowling Night; my flash piece that was published in the January issue of Eclectic Flash.

After I did the deer in the headlights thing for a couple of minutes I started laughing at the idea. You see, Bowling Night is a horror piece.

And well, I didn't think that my voice would quite do the piece justice.

I emailed Brad back and told him that I sound like a twelve year old doing an impression of Minnie Mouse doing a chipmunk. And I didn't think that it would work for me to read a horror piece.

Well, he LOVED the idea of such a juxtaposition and encouraged me to record the piece.

So I did, and it only took me two takes. And I was pretty tickled with the results. I sent it off to him and waited for a response.

This was his response, and I even gave him a chance this morning to edit it for exuberance:

"Oh, my God, oh, my God! It's wonderful, simply wonderful! I told you your prepubescent--er, I mean, lovely child-like voice would add something to it. Your voice reading it makes it that much more shocking, because I really thought he was cooking and getting rid of leftovers. I absolutely love it."

So I guess he liked it. I spent the next two days wandering around thinking I should record everything I write…..But then I figured that would become problematic because, as you know some things take a while to read aloud and I have that whole thing where I MUST BE FED every three hours…..I could just imagine me reading one of my novels while slurping soup. Don't think that would go over very well. 

But what did go over well was my friend Annmarie Lockhart's recording of her own pieces from the January issue. She had the same deer in the headlights reaction that I did, only hers was more of a fear of her accent overpowering her writing. I heard her recordings and they were just divine. I didn't even hear an accent. I just heard a lovely light lilting voice. After we both sent our recordings off to Brad, we were discussing Brad's awesome ideas to draw more readers to his magazine.

Annmarie said that since so many authors are enjoying reading their work for the upcoming "Voices" page at Eclectic Flash that Brad has really let the genie out of the bottle.

We both think that as the magazine grows he will come up with even bigger and better things. 

I told Annmarie that I was onboard with the whole adding a new dimension to print publishing and exposing more and different parts of an author to the reading public.

But I am going to draw the line at mud wrestling.