It’s a little bit like revisiting last week’s research trip, to go through all my audio and video notes and try to get them into a form where they will be useful to me when the time comes to revise The Silent Desert, a title that is starting to grow on me. I’m up to about to 82,500 words as of this morning and I hope to be very close to the end by the time this coming weekend finishes up. I finished a difficult scene this morning and am now ready to embark on the final roller coaster ride of the book. I hope to bring it in at 100,000 words. I tend to write long on first drafts and then cut mercilessly on rewrite. Missing Persons started out at 105,000, I think, and is now down to about 94,000.
Anyhow, I finished transcribing the audio recordings yesterday, and ended up with a 23-page (single-spaced) document. Except for cutting out the verbal tics and preambles, I decided to just write down exactly what I said instead of editing or prettying it up. It’s not meant for publication and the notes are a stream of conscious dialog with myself that track the evolution of some ideas and the inception of others.
The next task is to figure out how best to preserve the video recordings. I think I’ll make a master VHS tape with everything on it for posterity (the little 8 mm tapes tend to get misplaced, I find) but I also want to transfer it to my computer so I can call up certain shots and settings. That means doing some sort of index, which is going to be time-consuming work. Time I’d rather spend on writing, but there are things we have to do. I was thinking this morning as I was getting out of the shower that if I didn’t have to shower every day, I could have another 20 minutes to write. If I didn’t have to eat, another hour or so maybe! And all those wasted hours sleeping. Man, if I didn’t have to sleep imagine how much more time I’d have to do things like index six and a half hours of video tape.
I transferred the first two hours of tape to my computer last night. Hogs up a pretty substantial amount of hard drive real estate, and that’s at comparatively low resolution. I don’t have a DVD burner, so the next best thing is to save it to Video CD (VCD). I thought I had discovered a great way to compress the files by saving them as a WMV (Windows Media) file, but then I discovered that the resulting output is about 1″ square on the monitor. The audio is all there, which is an important part, but I need to see things, dammit! I’m having fun learning how to use the video editing software. It automatically takes the two-hour stream and detects where I turned the camera on and off, so I can easily remove the sections where I accidentally left the camera on when I thought it was off (two minutes of video capturing the dome light in my car) and also break it down into files that I can save on CD. I’m still experimenting with the best format: MPG vs AVI.
What I’m reading: Lucky You by Carl Hiaasen. Funny Florida caper involving a lottery winner, two intellectually challenged white supremacists, a community whose local economy is based on fake religious icons (e.g. a weeping Virgin Mary and an oil stain on the highway that resembles Christ), a journalist and a Hooters waitress.
