Me listening to my daughters tell a combined imaginary tale about knights, dragons and monsters in a mystical land, and I was trying to transcribe this hectic, self referential logic nightmare of a tale as they spoke it out loud in tandem like a vomited stream of consciousness. It was such a vivid memory, I could feel the fluctuating story ideas, like they were there breathing at my finger tips. It made almost no sense as they told it, but in my dream I was able to sort of throw it on the table to smash apart, and then take a really wide angle lens to it and rebuild it into a coherent epic fantasy novel. The best part about it was taking the whole spoken tale and sort of doing this exploded view – like you get of an engine diagram format, but being able to draw elements together, or add parts and realign story beats so that it all made sense, and flowed together. It was a wildly exciting dream, and when I woke up I remembered absolutely none of the story, but only the rush of picking it apart and putting it back together to make some kind of sense. Which sounds tedious, but also like a performance in and of itself. I’d love to revisit that dream, and actually remember the story my girls told me. If you’ve ever spent time listening to kids under six tell you stories, you know how many gaps there can be, what sort of logical leaps you need to make, and how easy it is to lose the plot. Good times. I guess I had a dream about editing. Wow! – go me. in
Day: January 6, 2022
Reading a whole novel series aloud.
Was both one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done. It took me just shy of a year and a half. I read the entire seven book Harry Potter series to my eldest daughter once she showed me she could pay attention long enough to make the exercise worthwhile. We started book one by reading half a chapter at a time, doing voices and dramatic pauses, sounding less like Alan Rickman as Snape and more like Will I am Shat tner. We read the first book three times in a row before she was comfortable enough to move on to book two, which we read twice. My throat took a real hit reading out loud every single day. Once the shit downs hit, and school went on line, we would read chapters throughout the day as well. We did that right up until this summer when we finally completed the whole series, and moved on to Percy Jackson, which was ok, but nowhere near as entertaining. We have yet to finish the fifth and final book of the series. Not sure if the payoff will be worth it. The whole point was to spend time together doing something fun, and imparting a life long love of reading and storytelling. I know that I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. I hope to some day read The Lord of the Rings to both kids. Then we can watch and enjoy the films together as well. Or I’ll enjoy it and they’ll tolerate it and move on which is fine to. I show them the thing of interest, and they can choose to enjoy it or find something else that interests them instead. I want them to like this stuff, but I don’t expect them to love it or become obsessed with it. I just want to be the one to offer it up to them, I don’t care if they don’t want to wrap themselves around it like I did as a preteen/child. I just want to introduce them to stuff I like so we can share it for a bit, as a fun experience and then let it go. If they adopt it – great, if not, at least we shared it for that brief moment in time.
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