A New Ad-Venture

For some time now I have been hearing and reading about audiobooks. Members of my family have told me that they listen to them while on long car journeys or taking long walks. The idea seemed alien and remote to me. After all, I have been addicted to the printed word since childhood, and cannot bear to be without something to read at all times. It’s true, I do manage to read ebooks on my iPhone and iPad, but still prefer to hold a physical book in my hand.

But after writing eight books in the last ten years I felt that the wellspring of my inspiration was beginning to dry up, so I decided to attempt to create an audiobook of one of my books. As it happens, I was wrong about that wellspring drying up, as the muse did resurface and inspired me to embark on writing a new book, but that is something that will progress slowly and organically, leaving me time and energy for my new venture.

I decided to narrate the book myself, as it seemed appropriate for an author to narrate his/her book themselves, and also because I couldn’t afford to pay someone to do it.

The first hurdle to be overcome was that of equipment. One of my sons generously provided me with a good-quality microphone into which I could read the text of the book I had chosen. I decided to start with my first novel, ‘The Balancing Game; a Child Between Two Worlds, a Society Approaching War,’ containing fictionalized accounts of my childhood in postwar London and my experience of living in Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, when I was heavily pregnant.

The second step was to install a suitable program in the PC in my study and to equip myself with headphones. My son helped me in this too, and then it was time for me to take my first steps into unfamiliar territory. Needless to say, my initial attempts were not very successful. I was completely unused to speaking out loud and – even worse – hearing myself. I was fascinated by the markings that were produced on the screen, tracking the volume, spacing and nature of the phrases coming out of my mouth, and even though I eventually came to find these helpful, at first I had considerable difficulty understanding them.

After my initial attempts, I ventured to send a sample of what I had managed to produce to members of my family who were accustomed to listening to audiobooks. “There’s background noise and I can hear you turning the pages of the book as you read,” was one comment. “One can hear the clock ticking,” was another. What was I to do? Yet more hurdles to be overcome. The body of my computer, which produced a faint whirring noise, was moved off my desk by my obliging hubby and set down on the floor, as far away from the microphone as possible. The clock was taken off the wall. I was told to read from my iPad instead of the physical book (this involved enlarging the print of all the ebooks in it).

The last impediment was to find a time when I was not too tired and there were no extraneous noises from the street outside (cars starting, garbage trucks working, dogs barking). Fortuitously, I found myself suffering from jet-lag after visiting our other son in the USA. And so, instead of struggling to get back to sleep at 3 a.m., I decided to get up, have a quick cup of coffee, and sit down at my desk.

Thus, for the last few months, I have been keeping to that routine, getting up around 4 a.m. and reading out part of a chapter every morning. I have come to enjoy the daily encounter with the words I wrote several years ago describing the life I once lived. The beauty of the audiobook program is that it enables me to erase a segment if I stutter or stumble or misread a word or a phrase, as I often do. After reading out each paragraph I listen to it and either redo it or leave it. Consequently, it takes me about two hours each morning to record some twenty minutes of text, but I think I’m slowly getting better at it.

If nothing else, the experience has increased my admiration for the tech-savvy members of my family, as well as the people who read the news on the radio without coughing, stumbling or misreading, as I do.

The job of tying all the ends together and creating a passable audiobook still remains to be overcome. Hopefully, in a few months’ time I’ll be able to inform the world of the new audiobook on the market. Watch this space.

If you enjoyed reading this, please consider reading one of my 8 novels, all available on Amazon, and from my website: www.shefer-vanson.com

Where the Crawdads Sing

This novel by Delia Owens has been on the bestseller lists for a long time, so when it was offered at a reduced price in a local bookstore I bought it, intrigued by its strange title. I still don’t know what a crawdad is, and I don’t believe anyone does unless they are an accredited expert in animal biology and behaviour, as the author is.

The book opens with a description of a five-year-old girl, Kya, who is watching her mother leave their home, a tumbledown shack in a marsh area of North Carolina. What follows is a moving account of the way the family lives, with an abusive and violent father who causes all Kya’s siblings to leave home at one stage or another, eventually joined by their mother. The little girl struggles to survive, essentially on her own, though her father does put in an occasional appearance and even supplies cash with which she buys basic supplies in the nearby town. She is shunned as ‘marsh trash’ by the local inhabitants, and manages to avoid attending school except for one day which is a traumatic experience for her.

The surrounding marshland features prominently in the child’s life. She learns to find her way around in it, to eke out a living from it by strabbling for mussels and eventually by catching and smoking fish, which she barters for clothes from a local African-American storekeeper. The physical and natural world of the marsh area is described very graphically by the author, and almost constitutes a character in its own right. The birds and insects are described with intelligence and insight, evidently the result of extensive observation.

Over the years Kya collects objects connected with the birds and wildlife of the region, and establishes a relationship of sorts with a local boy, Tate, who is also interested in the marsh wildlife. She matures into a beautiful, if somewhat eccentric, young woman, but feels abandoned when Tate goes off to college in another town. Another young man, Chase, comes into her life, but their relationship is somewhat tenuous. Eventually, after various complications, Tate comes back to her, and they resume their relationship, each of them involved in studying the flora and fauna of the region in one way or another.

After many twists and turns, Kya is put on trial for the murder of Chase, whose body has been found at the base of the local fire tower. What happens next is unexpected, even shocking, and eventually the mystery is solved, albeit in a somewhat unsatisfactory manner.

Still, ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is a good read, combining interesting characters and plot with a fascinating account of a region which seems as remote to me as anything from outer space, and could equally constitute a science fiction saga.

The Corona Effect

When it all started, just about two years ago, everyone thought that the nasty bug known as Corona, or Covid 19, would soon come to an end. When it didn’t, precautionary measures were put into effect, with lockdowns, quarantine and the wearing of masks. People had to keep a certain distance from one another, and social mixing was either discouraged or actually forbidden.

Keeping apart from one another became a natural way of life. Physical proximity to anyone other than one’s immediate family was suddenly seen as a threat to life and limb. No one wanted to end up in hospital on a life-support machine, cut off from almost all human contact. Horror stories of children unable to bid farewell to a dying parent or, worse still, husbands and wives unable to do the same for one another, abounded.

Our lives, our whole way of living, changed. Doing the weekly supermarket shop became an almost insurmountable challenge. Deliveries by masked strangers who left packages of groceries outside the front door and departed without a word was virtually the norm. One refrained from opening one’s front door until the delivery person had left.

Sometimes going to a shop or store was inevitable, and the experience was well-nigh traumatic. The other people there were regarded as a threat. You inspected the other customers to see if they were masked, and if so, if the mask was properly over their mouth and nose. Going round a store was more like a law-enforcement operation than a normal daily activity. Everyone was regarded with suspicion. Everyone was a potential threat.

And so, either little by little or in one fell swoop, our social and cultural life came to an end. Travel abroad was more or less impossible. There were no more concerts, theatre performances or public lectures, and their replacement by Zoom or other screen-based interaction constituted a poor substitute for the things that had formerly made our lives more meaningful and interesting. Almost everything that had improved the quality of life disappeared. I feel particularly sorry for young people, who should be able to go out and enjoy life, but instead are being restricted to minimal contact with others.

And then, a year ago, the vaccinations appeared, and there was hope that our normal way of life could be resumed once more. The roll-out of vaccines went at different rates in different countries, but essentially the Western world seemed to be on the brink of a return to normality. That, however, was not to be. The swell of people opposing vaccination for a variety of genuine or spurious reasons has remained steady and is still a threat to those of us – the majority – who have been vaccinated. It’s a case of people who accept science and those who oppose it, and for the moment the minority that adheres to prejudice, superstition and/or delusion is able to restrict the freedom of everyone else.

It has become natural to avoid normal human contact. It has become customary to regard anyone who doesn’t wear a mask as an anti-social being. And so, from a fairly gregarious, average person I find myself turning into a misanthropic, distrustful churl, someone who shuns human contact, preferring to remain alone inside my home rather than venture out and mingle with other human beings.

The problem is, I don’t know if I can ever go back to being the person I once was.

Down the Time Tunnel

When one of my two sisters asked me to try and find a document about our father, who died twenty years ago, I remembered the filing cabinet. Twenty years ago it took my sisters and me many months to sort through his possessions and dispose of them. His metal filing cabinet, containing dozens of files and papers of various kinds, ended up in the basement of my house, and has remained there virtually untouched ever since.

Our father was reluctant to part with any document or letter that ever reached him, and there were many of those. As I went through the heavy metal drawers the world of my parents re-emerged beneath my fingers. There was a big brown envelope containing the many lovely birthday cards and wishes my father had received for his sixtieth birthday (he lived to be eighty-seven). There were bank statements from England, where he spent most of his adult life, as well as from Israel, where he retired when he turned sixty-five.

There were folders of documents and correspondence relating to the various stages in his life, first in Germany, where he was born in 1916 and whence he fled in 1938, then in England (1939 to 1984) and finally in Israel. Three countries, three languages, and more information than I could possibly cope with on my own.

It was then that I came across the folder of correspondence and documents he had assiduously assembled concerning my own wedding, fifty-five years ago. Suddenly, it all came back to me. I had been living in Israel for a couple of years. My parents were still in England. All our communication was by means of letters. My future husband and I met and decided to get married rather more quickly than was customary in England at that time. However, my parents bravely congratulated us and took their prospective son-in-law to their bosom.

Because my family had relatives in Israel with whom I was in frequent contact, I took my fiancé (though we had no official engagement) to meet them and informed them of our forthcoming marriage. Almost to a man (and woman), they expressed delight, welcomed my prospective husband and speedily brought out something with which to drink ‘lechayim’ to celebrate the occasion. I reported all this joyfully in my weekly letter home.

But it seems that all was not peace and harmony in the wider family at hearing my news. The letters I sent my parents at the time tell the story. “On Shabbat afternoon we went to tell the (relatives who shall remain nameless — D.S.). To my surprise, when I told them that we were getting married they were struck dumb, with nothing but sheer horror written on their faces. They could not even pretend to be pleased or raise a smile between them.”

I wish you could have heard me laughing when I read these words down in the basement the other day. I had completely forgotten about all the family drama at the time of the wedding. With hindsight, I think they expected some kind of long courtship or even vetting process, of which they felt deprived.

It’s all water under the bridge now. Our relations with our relations were eventually mended, and the river of life continued to flow and take us all wherever we were destined to go. But I’m glad I managed to take a trip down the time tunnel and see how young, innocent and vulnerable I once was.