Dinky's Docket

Today's the first day of my wife's class which means I took the kids to soccer by myself. Junior's team actually scored a goal tonight! Making the score one to nine thousand or something like that. Of course, Junior was on the sideline at that moment. When he is playing he's still hanging back, warily eyeing the ball, careful not to get too close to it. That's all right. I saw the parent of a five-year old in the game going on next to ours haranguing his youngster, screaming at him to "PAY ATTENTION." When do kids that age pay attention to anything?

I finished Snow Falling on Cedars the other day. It did to me what The Handmaid's Tale did: It made me want to write. I need to get the paper versions of each of those books and study them. When a book leaves you with gladness at having read it, you need to figure out why. I've now jumped into A Song for the Asking by Steve Gannon. I'm not impressed so far. I guess Cedars is a hard act to follow. The dialogue is pretty weak, especially when the kids are speaking. It doesn't flow or have much life in it. He's much better at writing action. I have lost myself in some of those moments, carried away by their movement. That's a good thing. My disappointment may also have a lot to do with the reading. A narrator's tone can really influence the way the listener perceives the story. That's one of the drawbacks of listening rather than reading--one that I put up with because I'd read three books a year instead of three a month otherwise. George Guidall reads this one and many others for Recorded Books, INC as does Frank Muller, neither of whom I like to listen to. I hate to be saying this about Mr. Muller because he's not doing too well right now. He experienced a bad motorcycle accident last year and has suffered brain damage and bodily injury that has left him physically and mentally incapacitated. My heart goes out to him and his family. He and Mr. Guidell are both highly praised for their narration, but it rubs me the wrong way. On the flipside, Peter Marinker, who read Cedars is brilliant. He has the right amount of drama in his voice. He doesn't try to become a woman when he's reading female dialogue. He's just a man reading woman's dialogue. The problem with doing it the other way, raising the pitch and becoming sing-songy, is that it makes you form the image of a homely she-male in your head. I remember listening to The Last Six Million Seconds by John Burdett and read by Stuart Langton. There was woman in it who was supposed to be indescribably beautiful, but I couldn't see her that way because her voice was that of a drag queen. If Langton had just read it in his own voice I could have replaced it with a beautiful woman's voice that I had conjured in my head.

I was listening to The Regulators by Richard Bachman (who, if you don't already know is really Stephen King) read by Muller and there was a mistake. Suddenly Muller broke out of character and said something like, "Note to the producer, I think this line should be read more like this...I'll read it both ways," then he got back into his over-the-top dramatic mode. I wish he hadn't. The voice he used to talk to the producer was much better.

Enough of that.

If, by some odd stroke of luck, someone is reading this, could somebody tell me how I can market my drawing abilities. Check out my website and tell me if I should even try. People see my drawings and ask me why I'm still working where I do, so I ask them if they would buy something and they cough and stutter and excuse themselves. So that, people, is why I still work.