A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Six-Hundred-And-Ninety-Three

I recorded myself reciting another set of poems tonight.  There are still a bunch that haven't been used from my last session, but with Melissa and I travelling, I figured it was better to do it now, with the recording setup that I have at home.  In some ways, I still find the whole process of recording these recitations difficult.  It is not that the actual process is all that complicated: I simply sit down at the computer and read the poems off the screen while recording.  There are, of course, many times that I wind up recording a single poem multiple times.  Often I don't even get through the whole poem before I stop the recording.  The thing is, this is still very new to me, and I am not entirely comfortable with it.  There is something that feels odd to me about reading the poems out loud in an empty room with only a machine listening.  I am used to reading my work, but generally it is with a live audience, and that is a very different.  The connection with the audience helps me to get my energy up for the reading, and I find that it takes a lot for me to replicate that.  I think that I am getting better at it, but I still find it rather stressful.

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