But in the meantime...

Owie. Typing hurts...

While I wait for the proof to come back from the printer, I've stumbled upon a bit of an interim project. Well... "a bit" is kind of an understatement.

It started out small enough. I decided that I want to make a book trailer for Lifesicle. If you've been reading this blog since the Becoming Marlo days, you'll know that I'm shit at the whole promotional, marketing aspect of being an author. I love making the thing. But the getting it out there part? I abhor it. It makes me feel dirty, and guilty, and ashamed of myself for asking people to buy my book. Hell, asking people to join the Facebook page, or even read this blog is super uncomfortable for me.

I had some neat ideas for ways I could market Marlo. I was going to make these bookmarks that had a lock of colourful clown hair dangling from them! I was going to start a Twitter account as if I was Marlo, making cute clown jokes and generally just being cheerful and whatnot. But the only thing I ever got the moxie to do was make some postcards that I left out in a little pile on a little table at the back of the TCAF bookstore. Hardly even anything at all.

So now that I'm a holding pattern on Lifesicle, I've got the same kinds of things going through my head about what I can do to get it out there. The book trailer idea seemed like a thing I could do, so that's where I'm focusing my attention.

Except it's getting a tad more ambitious than I had originally intended...

There are some pretty neat book trailers out there. Check out this post by Brainpickings to see some super cool ones. Obviously I don't have the budget to pay royalties on a real song made by an actual musical artist, nor to hire professional actors or anything like that. But in the spirit of Lifesicle, the idea of making it all myself using the tools at my disposal is exactly the right kind of thing to do. It matches the story. 

So what started out as a little one-minute movie with some basic images, the back cover blurb for the book, and a cheap-as-possible soundtrack has become kind of a production.

I keep dancing around it, so here it is: I'm writing my own song for the soundtrack. 

It feels weird saying that. For one, I don't like to announce that I'm "going" to do something. I make my announcements late in the game, after I've already gotten crotch-deep into it, or even after I'm near the finish line. Announcing I'm doing something right at the beginning makes me assume everyone is rolling their eyes going "sure, right, uh-huh".

The other reason it feels weird to say I'm writing a song, is because I'm not a musician and I've never written a song before, LOL!

I mean, look. I took piano lessons for a few years as a kid. I took vocal lessons in highschool for four years, and I've been singing for fun my whole life. I have a ukulele that I play occasionally, like every 6 months or so. "Play" is a generous word for it... I basically relearn the same 5 chords every 6 months, haha.    

But the thing is... I need a song. I don't want to pay for one. And I guess when I'm in need of something, I'm always like "How can I do it myself?". 

And I thought it might work, you know, in the spirit of Lifesicle. It might be kind of charming. Suit the story. So the plan was to string together the 5 chords that I know and hum along to it, and record it on my iphone, and call that the soundtrack.

But it's gotten to be much more than that. The chords and the rhythm? Achieved. I'm still practicing to get it down as smooth as I can, practicing every night after work. Hence the sore fingertips and difficulty with typing.

Next step is to work out the melody. That's going to be the hardest part, I think. But lyrically, I know what the song will be about, and after I've nailed down the melody, I'll draft the lyrics. Then the recording will begin.

The bathroom upstairs has amazing acoustics. The recording will happen in there, lol. And not on my iphone, either. Using real recording software. There's a pair of applications that came pre-installed on my laptop, called ACID and SoundForge. I'm going to record it on ACID (groan, I'm sure they called it that on purpose for that reason, lol) and then edit it on SoundForge. 

It's going to be a multi-track recording, with strings, keyboards, and drums, bass, lead and backing vocals, and all kinds of cool sound effects. How am I doing all of this in my bathroom? How am I doing this at all? Well, I don't want to give it away, before I get crotch-deep into it. I already feel like I've said too much.


 

 
Let me just say, this is all the just the soundtrack for the trailer. I have a whole plan for the visual part too. My expectations may be a little high, LOL. But I'm not going to worry about that right now. I've got to go learn how to use ACID.