One of the strategies I employed while revising You Are Here was to read the entire book aloud to myself. (I didn’t do this for The Love Thing, and I regret it.) If anything sounded unnatural to my ears, I rewrote it — or, more often, I took the awkward-sounding words out. Even still, I needed the services of a good copy editor to get the tone and pacing down right.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the attached audio file of the first few paragraphs of “You Are Here,” in which the novel’s hero, Peter Bankston, attempts to draw a chalkboard masterpiece. (It’s about two minutes long.) For you art history majors out there, his Christmas drawing is a parody of a famous painting that hangs in a famous musuem; I’ll give you the answer in a later post.
