listening to rick rubin read to me

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In a manner not dissimilar similar to how it took me eight years of mowing two two-acre lawns every week (I'm since retired) to start listening to podcasts, I've only just – after 11 years of running nearly every day – started listening to audiobooks (also a recent first) during the day's run. While my latent drummer muscle memory makes music-while-running a likely non-starter (as I will either run in tempo with the music or attempt to fit the music in my head to my tempo ) audiobooks present none of those difficulties (though they have their own, chief among them being a difficulty in processing everything that's coming at me, like listening to someone who won't shut up).

General practice: if I like what I'm hearing – as I do now, with Rick Rubin reading his own THE CREATIVE ACT (reminds me of David Lynch's CATCHING THE BIG FISH) – I buy the physical book both for easy revisitation and as a repository of noted memory. Along with Rubin, the other one that got that treatment was James Clear's ATOMIC HABITS (excellent, by the way. Might re-listen at some point). What both have in common was that the author themselves read the book; in Rubin's case particularly, it felt like / feels like I'm working with him; I get why artists want to. Can't imagine standard audiobook guy voice having the same impact – though standard audiobook guy reading certain lines is amusing in and of itself.

Sticking with non-fiction of the manual/idea variety for now (though I might add poetry), things that I have a harder time making myself make the time to sit and read each day. Philosophy, too.

links/2023w10.1

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the second bit

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Too much is made of the first paragraph or first scene: while it's difficult, sure, and is your (insert type of audience)'s entry point into the concoction they're going to spend the next 15 minutes to 15 weeks imbibing – no pressure, right – it rarely (once I get rolling) gives me any significant problems. Or, rather, it rarely gives me the same type of problems as the second bit, which is, itself, its own kind of entry point (and the point at which I’m presently slamming into a brick wall): if the first bit is the introduction to your story and character, the second – or, rather, the transition between the first and second bits – is the introduction to you and your voice as the writer, based solely on the choice you make here: is it dissonant? does it harmonize with what came before? continue? purposely throw the (insert type of audience) off?

Did you hear the one about the writer who thought they knew what they were doing? Ha / hilarity doth ensue.