R2M

Following the sage advice of my editor, Nina Alvarez, I'm using an e-reader to listen to my next book to allow me to get outside the story. Hearing Keys Disease read by someone else is rather thrilling and even a little hair-raising. Listening makes it so much more realistic. What an ingenious idea! (And honestly, one I'd never have thought of, so thanks Nina!)

As you can imagine, my immature sense of humor gets the best of me when the computerized, emotionless female voice says bad words. (I've dubbed her R2M; Read to Me. Apparently, I've got a slight nerd gene floating around.) 120 pages into the exercise, and I still laugh out loud when R2M drops the f-bomb or gives a flat goddammit. We all know someone who laughs harder at their own jokes than anyone else in the room. Quite frequently, I'm that person, but I think it's swell. It makes spending time alone a damn good time.

Back to the point, Nina's suggestion was brilliant. I'm catching things that I'd overlooked in spite of multiple read-throughs. Not huge, glaringly ugly obstacles, but small bits that should be cleaned up. Repeating a word that was used a few sentences earlier, inconsistencies in a character's speech, that sort of thing. They were invisible to me until I heard the words being read aloud. I find that fascinating.

Stop yawning. This is exciting stuff.

Know what else is exciting? My Irish is coming right along. I can say please and thank you, ask for a menu, order a sandwich and a beer (critical), and talk about the weather. I'm currently working on the verb "to eat", which if you've seen the size of my caboose, is a very important one for me to master. I find it charming that instead of saying "The men eat." as we do in English, the Irish say, "Itheann na fir.", literally "Eat the men". Please admit you see the humor in that sort of sentence structure. If you don't, then perhaps this isn't the blog for you.

Fortunately, my high school French teacher, Catherine Nye, was a top-notch educator. Her methods for learning to conjugate verbs stuck with me and thirty years later, I'm using her shoe form to learn the verbs "to be", "to eat", and "to drink". These are probably the most important for me. You're scratching your head. Think about it. The things I will most likely need to convey or the things I'll want to talk about will involve my state of being, "I am...lost, tired, hungry, happy, etc" or involving the actions of eating and drinking. (Refer to a few paragraphs above regarding the size of my backside.)

Olaim beoir agus ta me sasta. (I drink beer and I am happy.) I suspect I will say this quite often whilst traipsing through the Motherland.

Slan.