Slurring isn't a problem I run into in the normal course of blogging. Egregious word repetition, emotional overshare and the occasional typo, yes. Slurring, not so much. Turns out, saying nipple tassles aloud is harder than I realized. When deciding which post to read aloud for Spoken Word Bloggery, my concern was more in finding something short than in how drunk I might accidentally sound as I read it. My recording needed a few takes anyway, because the dog decided Spoken Word Bloggery translated to Pup Barkery and Frantic Canine Collar Shakery.

As much as I adore blogging, it's oddly flat. You stare at words on a screen and you probably have a picture of the person whose words you're reading, but you don't have much sense of them as a living, breathing entity. Sometimes it's easy to think these words spring from nowhere, like the internet is a vast word machine that assigns different personalities to different urls and churns out reams of text, sometimes on a schedule, sometimes at random. There's an oddly dehumanizing aspect to it, even as many of us get so comfortable pulling out our insides and splashing them all over Wordpress.

You probably have no idea what my voice sounds like. If you called me right right now, I probably wouldn't recognize you unless you gave me your url, like some odd blogger recognition code. There are people I've read for years whose speaking voice would sound foreign to me.

Hence, Spoken Word Bloggery. If you're so inclined, choose one of your posts and read it out loud. Then tell me about it, so I can listen.

If you're curious about how I might sound when I'm telling you a nice little bedtime story about strippers, here's a post pulled from the depths of the archives. It's full of useful hints, should you ever find yourself in a burlesque club in Manhattan after four martinis.

How to Put a Dollar Bill in a Go-Go Dancer's G-String by amberadrian