Tag: social media

Vocally Sexist?

Posted on by kat_richardson

Black-and-white photo of a dark-haired young woman holding a microphone as if she is about to start singing.

My “Sin” of Vocal Fry:

I was watching a video on YouTube by linguist Dr. Geoff Lindsey about the recent hate expressed for the speech phenomenon of “Vocal Fry” and some of the mechanism, sound symbolism, and other issues around it. One of the things he brings up near the end of the video is the idea that much of the of the current discussion may have an element of sexism and/or ageism to it. And, as someone who does speak with a bit of “fry” (or “creaky voice” as the British call it), well… I have an opinion.

The Vocal Fry Among American Women discussion that’s going around reminds me of a phenomenon I encountered as a singer and speaker when I was in my twenties and thirties. My male instructors/directors and coworkers (with the exception of my High School choir director Richard Stout) often directed me to sing and speak more “forward,” to sound “brighter and more open,” while my female instructors/directors and coworkers often preferred my tone when it was slightly more relaxed, or “creaky.” “Pitchier” as one of them called it. Other women, I discovered, sometimes found my “bright” tone irritating or “girly,” while men found it more “feminine,” except on the phone, where, ironically, men often told me I sounded “sexy” when my voice was more “fried.” So, yes, I do think a lot of the current public hate for “vocal fry” utilized by American women is sexism (and ageism, since it’s usually directed at women under 40.)

I’ve been working to return to my lower, more relaxed tone recently, since, as I age, I care less about how “feminine” I sound and more about how comfortable I am with my own voice.

We should be comfortable with our voices as with our bodies, we should not find ourselves attacked for what is natural and comfortable for us. I’ve always had a little bit of a lisp; I speak in a lower register than some women, and with a bit of “fry”; I have a regional accent (Central California Valley melded to “SoCal/Val”); I “whoop” when I laugh; and I’m perfectly fine with it. You should be too.

 

 

No Idea

Posted on by kat_richardson

What I’m doing

So it’s been awhile. Doing some Editing and Writer Coaching,  but still looking for more clients, got an account on BlueSky Social (you can find me there as @katrichardson) in hopes of dodging the Social Media apocalypse on Twitter, and throwing myself against the wall of some short stories and an attempt at A New Novel (or whatever it turns into.)

The Edgar Allen Poe inspired anthology Kickstarter at Falstaff Books was successful, so that’ll be coming out before the end of the year (sooner, IIRC, but check the campaign link updates or Falstaff Books for info as that moves further in production.

In the meantime, it’s mostly dogs, digging/filling holes and grading roads on the someday-house site, and trying not to eat all the tasty baked goods Mr. Kat has been learning to make.

 

Living in Virtuality

Posted on by kat_richardson
line drawing of woman in casual clothes, sitting at at table at home, working on her laptop while sipping a hot beverage. a window and potted house plants in the background
Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay

Not Going There

I’ve never been so glad to be working via remote. I am being interviewed for a podcast later today, and I’ll still be able to get some other work done, rather than spending most of my day commuting two hours to a recording studio for 90 minutes of set up and recording, then driving home again another 2 hours.
Some things about virtuality suck, but not commuting is not one of them.

 

 

A Qualified “Yay!”

Posted on by kat_richardson

 

And I am Tired.

I have dragged all my author copies of the Greywalker novels home from the storage unit out in Lovely Sequim (which is pronounced “Skwim” if you wondered). Ten boxes and we had to rush home to avoid being rained on and ending up with soaked books in the bed of the truck, stopping once to wrestle the tarp back into place. On arriving home (dry, thank you) Mr Kat and I carried all of the boxes up the stairs to the office/storage unit over the garage, plus unloading and moving all the other boxes we brought back as well. Wheee! what fun (not)! And all of this after having gotten stuck in mud on our mountainside and having to dig gravel from the side of the road with an entrenching tool and a steel dog bowl to dump said gravel under the tires in the SNOW (no, I’m not kidding) to get back down the hill to our storage unit to begin with! I think I moved about 200 pounds of gravel, and very large stones to act as wheel chocks while we did so.

So, now I shall go through the boxes, sort, count, and inspect how many of what I’ve got. It’s highly likely that I’ll be posting information about signed copies and sets for sale here, to consolidate information in just one place, and only posting links to my FaceBork and Twitter accounts. But first, *flops on floor and imitates a poor, sad deer staring at the truck that hit it…* Owwww…

Committing Myself

Posted on by kat_richardson

 

 

I may have Opened my Mouth…

Over on the various social media I engage with (Facebook, Twitter—yes, I know I’m frighteningly behind the times) I may have mentioned selling off my author copies of the Greywalker novels which I’ve been hoarding for years. So I guess I’ll have to get my ass in gear and update this site and make some kind of sales/orders page here. A pair of tasks for which I do not feel particularly well-suited. BUT it needs to happens so it shall!

In the meantime, I kinda forgot that I had this in my backpocket… I wrote a novella for Frank Zafiro’s Grifter’s Song con-artist caper series back in… oh… a while ago. And the paperback edition came out in September! But I forgot all about it because my author copy got put in the wrong mailbox and I didn’t get it until last week! But it’s here now, so I urge you to go check it out!

And I’m RE-revising a Certain Historical Noir Urban Fantasy and see if I can’t find a home, at last, for the infamous Marty. See y’all whenever I get this place cleaned up. Again.

 

Casting Stones?

Posted on by kat_richardson

Locked Out of Your Stuff

So, there’s an article at the New York Times about Bitcoin billionaires losing access to their accounts because they’ve forgotten their passwords and the bitch of it is that the structure of Bitcoin means they can’t just reset the password, so unless they magically remember, these poor suckers are out, in some cases, billions of techno-dollars.

My first impulse is to snicker and mutter snarkily “oh, poor babies.” But on further consideration, I don’t like that response. Here are people who took a risk and invested in a start-up technology, just as anyone who invests takes a risk, This tech worked and it turned a ridiculous profit. At least for now. You wouldn’t laugh at the misfortune of someone who lost their wallet, or lost money investing in, say, the Rocket e-Book. Taking public pleasure in the misfortune of these guys isn’t really any different—yeah, they are great targets when a lot of us are struggling to keep a roof over our heads, but taking the piss smacks of juvenile jealousy and gloating. It’s beyond Schadenfreude.

You’re probably rolling your eyes at me and muttering “Oh come on, Kat…” But I’m serious. This is a lousy attitude and one I don’t want to feed in myself.

Why? Because the root of their problem is something very ordinary, very human: the difficulty of remembering a complicated string of letters, numbers, and symbols that are otherwise meaningless. Here are a handful of people who might be ridiculously rich—and some already are, but some aren’t—if they could only remember their password, and we’ve all been in the position of forgetting a password. Some people even lose access to important things because of it. You know: that email address that linked to your old website or Facebook page, your old phone’s backup directory, or that guest account on the old laptop… It happens all the time. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to you. Don’t pretend it hasn’t.

And don’t pretend your urge to sneer isn’t at least partially motivated by old-fashioned jealousy that you don’t have that kind of dough to lose. I know mine is.

But to gloat and make public mock of these poor schmoes is hypocritical, and after the year we’ve had, this sort of snark is just petty.

Let he/she/they who are without password-forgetfulness cast the first stone.

Me, I’m thinking of writing a book, instead. See, there’s this guy and he can’t remember…