My muse has stopped telling me the story of the Castrati I was in the process of writing. What I’m thinking I might do now is start a re-write of what I already have. I already came across one hole in the plot that I hadn’t intended to be there and I need to figure out how the hole is filled in.

I’m also debating about releasing it on this blog as a PDF after I’ve finished the rewrite.

On the other hand, my muse is quite mean to me. I finished listening to Nathan Lowell’s South Coast while I found the book took a little bit more to get into than it did for the Share series, I did really enjoy it. However it wasn’t what I assumed a story that had been touted as being a “Shaman coming of age” story, would be.

My muse then gave me a basic plot about what it would be like. Harry Potter meets the Shaman. Will I do anything with it? I don’t know, we’ll see.

People who listen to my podcast PodioMedia Chat have probably been hearing me talk about my upcoming audio cinema for a while, and you might have been wondering, “Is he actually going to do it or not?” Well today I listened to a song, and it gave me inspiration for the first episode.

I totally changed all the rules, instead of having a Goliath script with tons of people in it, I came up with a short script, and a total of 5 characters. I came up with the idea of having fewer characters a while ago while listening to real old time radio and counting how many people a lot of them had in it.

It was a rare exception to find an audio drama that would have more than 5 or 6 people in it on a regular basis. Of course I have no idea how many people were took part but were never voiced, but I’m talking just about actors/actresses.

And after finishing that short episode, the start of the second episode already has came to me, which might be a good idea to start working on it now too, before the idea goes to far away from me.

When its available for public consumption, expect to find out more about it here.

[edited 3-4-08] fixed link in post

In a book I checked out from the local library to do research on my new story it had one paragraph I found rather interesting. The book was the English translation of Patrick Barbier’s book The World of the Castrati sorry I forgot to copy down what page the following was on, but it was in Chapter 1, Castration:

Another trait shared by the castrati was the relatively small size of the sexual organ which did not develop as in other men. Although a late operation was likely to have little influence in this respect, precocious castration, at the age of seven or so, often led to the opposite effect.

If I’m understanding this correctly if a boy of 7 was emasculated he would wind up with a larger penis than his counterparts who were emasculated a year older?

One of the interesting things with doing research into this project, is most of my information was written in the Queen’s English, which is just different enough from the US English, to sometimes make understanding a bit fuzzy.

If you happen to believe the quoted paragraph doesn’t say what I think it does, please do let me know in a comment, and please tell me why you don’t think it does.

I saw the movie Farinelli, one of my new friend’s were willing to put it in their NetFlix queue for me. It doesn’t really cover a lot that is useful to me in my book, at least where I’m currently at in it. However I’m sure it will help.

Farinelli, is considered to be one of the most famous of all Castrato’s. This film is a 2005 French film, so for about 98% of the movie you must have subtitles on if you don’t understand French.

It does have an R rating, mainly because of nudity and sex scenes, I believe.

Overall its a good movie, I’d suggest you get it, if at all interested and don’t mind subtitles.

I was able to write more on my story today. As of today I’m at a total of 2,476 words, 727 of those were from tonight. I hope to do more writing tomorrow, but for now I need to go to sleep.

I’ve recently started working on a new story idea. The premise of the idea is about a Castrato who didn’t become successful in the opera. One thing that makes this a very unique challenge, is we really know very little about what it was like to be a peasant in the Renaissance times. This is likely due to most seemed not to be literate. Ironically, most of the Castrato came from the peasant life.

Interested in finding out more? BBC Four did a very interesting show which you can (at least as of this writing) find by clicking here. It is missing the first 30-50 seconds, but no vast amounts of information is lost.

Should I release more information about this project, as I continue to work on it? Let me know.