November 2011 - Celtic Connexions

Well, it’s almost ready to reveal. I’ve spent a lot of time today with my face in the computer working on it. And starting from scratch with the Windows 7.0 version of Movie Maker, it’s not so difficult to work with at all. So selecting my photos, transitions, effects and what not took a lot of time, albeit enjoyable. Then I spent a period of time where I was sequestered off in the bedroom recording the audio track of the first two chapters using my Sony MP3 recorder. It didn’t seem like it at the time but when I opened the file in Audacity, it was the better part of half an hour!

Another bonus to Audacity, is I was able to edit out any flubs I made since I don’t read out loud well (and believe me, I flubbed in a few places) and shorten some long pauses when I wasn’t able to move to the next screen on the iPad in a timely manner. My first recording might have lasted 30 seconds and I shut it down on my own. Second time around things went swimmingly but still a few moments but I perservered and finished the recording.

Back in touch with humans, I self-taught myself in the workings of Audacity. It’s a really cool program and am looking forward to doing more things with it than I did today. Anyway, I worked away at editing the audio track… reducing the length of gaps, removing moments of tongue-tideness and cut it down to about 8:00 minutes.

I’ll reveal the finished product here soon so stand by for the official announcement of its unveiling.

On Saturday, November 19th, my husband and I both Brian Henry’s inspirational and motivational writing workshop “Writing your life & other true stories” in Kingston.

I always learn something at Brian’s workshops, and yesterday was no exception. My husband and I share an interest in genealogy and we thought that being able to tell the story in an interesting way would be far better appreciated by the family whose stories we’d be writing.

The genealogy software we use does create “book” format but it contains just raw genealogical data and while that’s good, there’s no personal reflections, memories, observations in it. Mind you, if you’re writing about someone/something from the 1800s or earlier, you’re not going to have much to go on other than a general social history of the time (since you weren’t alive then) and assume that your ancestors were in the same predicament as everyone else. If you’re lucky, you had an ancestor who could read and write and kept journals.

Whether either one of us tackles a segment in time of one of our ancestor’s lives and writes about it remains to be seen, although I have written articles on Home Children, including one on my father. Still not quite the same as a novel-length memoir.

Now that I have the knowledge of how to write it and the tricks of using novel writing techniques to get it “on paper”, I’ll be much better equipped for when the times comes.

I’m looking forward to my next workshop with Brian.

My Scottish roots and writing by Melanie Robertson-King