Yet Another Update: The nearly always excellent Chad Finn has a write up of the Bobby Robins NHL experience last night.

Update: I should have included a link to one of the first profiles on Bobby Robins to come out since he’s made the big club, by Dan Cagen in the MetroWest Daily News – “A dream come true as Bobby Robins makes the NHL“. So between that article and the BDC article/video, you should go have a read.

So a player named Bobby Robins, a hard-working 32 year old, as they will repeatedly tell you, hockey player has, at long last, made the big club — he’s on the roster for Opening Night for the Boston Bruins against the Philadelphia Flyers.

I started following Bobby Robins last year, maybe the year before, when he hit Providence. He looked just like William Murphy, the protagonist in Butterfly, a novel. He seemed like an earnest guy, working hard at his hockey career, his life as a family man, and his life as a public figure. I was doing a little bit of research on those guys who get stuck in the trenches of goon-dom, who languish in the minor leagues, looking up at the feet of the NHL — my own hockey career is far less successful than theirs, so while I thought I’d done a good job of capturing William Murphy as a lifelong minor league hockey player with flashes of the big leagues, I wanted extra color, some inspiration for applying that third or fourth coat of realistic paint to the novel. At any rate, amongst the George Laraques, the P.J. Stock highlight reels, Thorty, Skillsy Hal Gill’s observations on Twitter, I found Bobby. After watching the couple videos he has up on his site, which counts as research, to the abject horror of my wife, I couldn’t help but root for the young man.

Now, I’m not writing as a hockey pundit, though I can be curmudgeonly and incoherent with the best of them and am available for hire, so I don’t know how having Bobby Robins on the Bruins’s fourth line is going to work out, but on a personal level I’m rooting for the guy and I hope it works out for him and the Boston Bruins.

So I’ve been doing the literary equivalent of rearranging the throw pillows in the house, organizing my sock drawer, wiping down the counters. Hunting for an agent is a little like fishing… at least the fishing I did when I was a kid. Most of the time I sat on the riverbank (the French River) and watched my fishing pole, and that was about it. It rarely involved any actual fish.

Well, one of my pillow arranging tasks was tarting up the Butterfly, a novel mini-site a bit more.

Based on some advice from an agent (not directed at me, necessarily, but useful, nonetheless), I decided to make the website/trailer website more presentable. I added a bio, the bio I’ve been sending to agents, a picture (good God help your eyes). I also added some more context about one of the main characters, William Murphy*. He’s an ex-hockey player who happened to be an enforcer — that brutal role where you stick up for your teammates and take and give a beating on nearly a nightly basis. When we were last in Ireland there were a number of articles, even there, about the concussion epidemic in rugby, a few players speaking out about the condition they were left in once their playing days were over (and usually much quicker than they’d have thought).

Over the last few years most of the attention has been on the National Hockey League and the National Football League, and the New York Times have an excellent documentary on Derek Boogaard, the Boogey Man who died a few years ago and whose brain has been studied to help diagnose the symptoms and severity of CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encencephalopathy) in athletes who often withstand blows to the head regularly.

The Hockey News had a link yesterday about a Swedish player who has been forced to retire at the age of 20. This is very similar to the type of stuff I was trying to dig up to highlight one possible theme to Butterfly, a novel. While he’s enjoyed a little more of a career than the kid who wrote this letter, and his playing days ended a few years ago, I think he’d identify with the sentiments in this letter.

At any rate, swing on by the new trailer site, let me know what you think, because I haven’t had interactions with any other human, and have vowed not to until I’ve got my claws into an agent.

* By the way, you may recognize William Murphy as my longtime partner and co-writer at Sane Magazine (though the content from that site is now here). For those of you (hi, mom!) who’ve been following along for a looooong time, indeed.

So it was one of those “hey, why don’t you?” kind of moments. My wife and dedicated First Reader said to me, after the first fifty pages, “Why don’t you make a book trailer?”

She explained the pieces she thought would make the cut and I agreed.

A few months later, she repeated the same thing. The book received more editing, more pages were laid down. She was speaking to me through a little food and mail slot in the heavy iron door, behind which I sat. I agreed.

Months more passed. Seasons changed. The book was finished. My beard was matted and home to a small family of squirrels. Again came the refrain through the food slot: “You should make a book trailer.” Again I agreed. “But,” I said, “first let me send it out to a publisher and an agent.”

The heavy iron door burst open. The bricks shook and chalk dust from my rudimentary calendar on the wall rained down on what I was embarrassed to find were chicken and possibly mice bones in the corner of my writing room. “You need to make a book trailer,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “You mean now.”

“And a book website.”

“Oh.”

And so I did. I present to you: Butterfly, a book trailer.

So the next batch of manuscripts have been sent off to the First Readers — I’m at the 150 page mark.

It’s a little like painting a room. You put on the first coat. Take a break for lunch, let that first coat dry. Put on the second coat on one wall. Notice a spot on the ceiling, go get some paint remover. Put on the second coat on another wall and the third coat on the wall which already has a second coat because you’d forgotten you’d already done a second coat.

Notice that the fourth wall is patchy. Give it a quick second coat in the trouble spots. Realize later that you need to now re-do that entire wall. Give the third wall a once over, and you see that you’d forgotten to tape off the outlets or remove their faceplates on that wall.

At least that’s how I paint a room*.

It’s a somewhat more productive method that I use for drafting and editing my novel, Butterfly, which I’m sure you’re just dying to get your grubby little hands on. But it’s a similar method to the painting analogy. And this time round I’ve added one new painter’s tool to my toolbox, to allow me to go over the previously painted (to belabor a metaphor) sections is to use the laptop’s built-in ability to turn text into a spoken track.

So I use Scrivener, that excellent Mac-based writing software for organizing my manuscript. I’ll select all the text documents that make up a chapter, especially one that needs some work done, which gives me one long chunk of text.

I’ve got a whole other long and boring system for marking chapters that need work, in-progress, near final draft, and final drafts with different colored flag icons, but I’ll probably go into that at some other time if any one at all out there cares.

So I’ve got my big long window full of text. I hit ⌘-a to select all (Edit > Select All), and then right-click (or click with two fingers on the trackpad of the laptop) the highlighted text. What you should see is that menu above… with an item at the bottom for “Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track.” It’ll ask you what voice you want to use (the default voice, Alex, isn’t too bad), and then you’re good to go. You’ll hear a little noise when the transcription of the text into audio is finished.

In my particular workflow I then right click on that file in iTunes, show it in the Finder, and copy the track to Dropbox, and then open it on my iPhone for my walking around time or drive-time to have a listen to a reasonable facsimile of what I’ve written.

This is far, far easier than reading the text yourself into a microphone and making your own version with your own voice. Besides, if you recorded your novel-in-progress in your own voice you’d likely just cringe at how that doesn’t sound a thing like you the entire time and not pay too much attention to the words you’re speaking.

* Now available for hire for reasonable rates for all your interior painting needs.