Autostenography

I've also begun transcribing my Greenbelt talks on Science Fiction and the Bible for my website. This is an odd experience, to say the least. I'm working from minidisk recordings of myself talking from notes (and copious rehearsal). There are bits missing: the first recording begins with me saying "-- shambling around going 'ughhhh'" [*].

I want the transcripts to be a reasonably accurate record insofar as that's possible: however, I'm amazed by how incoherent and rambling I appear to have been. I'm obviously not transcribing the occasions when I say "er", "ah" or "um", repeat words, hesitate and the like, but my speaking style is startlingly different from my prose style. I run sentences into one another with "and"s and "but"s, I change direction halfway through a thought and end up with something that actually isn't a sentence at all, and I assert -- embarrassingly often -- that what I'm talking about is "interesting because...", as if I'm desperately hoping to persuade the audience.

Hey ho. It's also a surprisingly long-winded process, given that the two talks together come to a little over an hour and a half, so don't expect to be seeing the web transcriptions any time soon.

One of the reasons why I'm doing this -- and why I had B. record the talks in the first place -- is because I'm very much hoping I can talk again at Greenbelt 2005, perhaps in a larger venue as well as at "Between the Lines". Watch this space for further news as to that.


[*] I go on to say "...is a marvellous cinematic image and I love it, but it isn't the character Mary Shelley wrote."