Because There Isn’t Much Real News…
… I write a bit about audiobooks, Shohei, Judge, Xander and the new kickoff rule
Good thing there hasn’t been any real news lately. It’s always nice to be in the middle of a quiet period …
I will spend the next three days—and the first three days of next week—narrating the WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL audiobook. I’ve only done this once before, for WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL… and the two things that surprised me about that experience were:
How utterly exhausting it was. I would come home each day after my sessions tired to the bone, tired like I felt after full days of moving boxes in the sweater factory when I was 19 years old. It didn’t make any sense to me—all I was doing was sitting (or standing) in front of a screen and reading my own words. And yet, I would come home and just want to crash. And I only read PART of WWLB—my marvelous friend Ellen Adair read a good 30-40% of it. I’m narrating all of FOOTBALL, so I’m expecting to feel a bit like Westley after he came back from the Mostly Dead.
How much I came to loathe my own words. It took me a long while to figure out that when narrating the book, you are not the author. You are the narrator. You are a slave to your own words. For the first day or two, I’d read a hundred different sentences, and my mind would immediately think, “Ooh, I need to rearrange those words” or “why did I use that verb, I’m changing it.” And the director would be in my ear to remind me that I CANNOT change the words, that the audiobook has to match the actual book.” I had to turn off the author side of my brain. Maybe that’s how actors who are also writers feel on the set when they have to read a line they know can be better. I don’t know. But it was disconcerting… and time-consuming. I’ll need to adjust more quickly this time.
We’re only 57 days out now from the publication of WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL. I’m so excited… at least I am right now. Ask me again after next week.
Shohei Ohtani hit a 473-foot monster on Sunday—his league-leading 30th home run of the season—and it’s worth watching again and again.
As our pal Dave Roberts said—and you will remember, Roberts held the previous Dodgers home run record for anyone born in Japan—“It’s just hard to fathom someone hitting a baseball like that.”
The mind-blowing thing about Ohtani is