Desperately Seeking a More Attractive Timbre

This might turn out to be a long, tangential post, but in terms of the writing process it could be interesting. (Talk about an uninspiring first line!)

A few weeks ago my cell phone broke. It crashed on the golf course and I don't really blame it. I was involved in a sales event for work, a tournament that lasted over 6 hours. By the 18^th hole I actually envied my cell phone's death.

It was my intention, prior to its passing, to wait until Verizon started carrying the iPhone before buying a new phone. The demise of "old faithful" forced my hand and I lost the luxury of choosing my own schedule for phone replacement. So, naturally, the iPhone not being an option, I went and bought a new fangled DROID phone. I like it. It's pretty handy to have around, and soon it should double as a Kindle eReader. Presently it lacks that eReading application, but I have made great use of another feature.

Years ago, during my long commutes from Halliburton up by the airport to my house down in Sugar Land (Houstonians will audibly groan when they read about that commute), I played with the idea of using a voice recorder to write my stories orally. It's hard not to think of ways to wisely use commuting time when you have over an hour of it each way. Despite a year of driving that commute to work, I never followed through with any of my voice recording plans.

Then, with my grandmother Muzzie needing help on her memoir, oral story-telling once again raised its head. For months I traipsed over to Muzzie's to record her stories into my computer. At home I would transcribe then edit her words and despite her critique, I think I gave her stories a pretty good home in a pseudo-memoir.

Now, thanks to the voice recording capability on my new DROID phone, I am once again finding the benefits of oral story-telling. My commute time is far less, only about 15 minutes, but that is just enough time for me to speak out a few pages of text. So far I like what I see. I tend to be far more succinct when I talk a story than when I type one. I felt I was bogging down in the details of the race described in "Off the Edge", the novel I'm in the midst of writing. I felt like I was mired in things that didn't matter. Speaking the story off the top of my head into the recorder tends to keep me on track.

Although I've only kept at it for a few days, to this point I'm impressed with the changes I'm seeing. I'm far more pithy and concise when I have to speak the story. If only I could do something about that awkward sounding voice. Perhaps a nose job will provide me with a more attractive timbre.