Well this is by far of all the character challenges I have ever faced the most wonderful and scary. Finding Gudrunlod. She’s my favorite heroine. She lives in the pages of The Rowan Canticles. But she’s real, oh yes. Scary real. And somewhere in the smithy of my soul, she’s obtainable.

In the pursuit of my artform, I attempt numerous character voices, like any character actor does. It’s a mimetic ability. Some of the voices are quite strenuous to perform, but they’re all worth it. Someday my throat will drop out and my career will come to an end, but until then, I’m still extremely interested in trolling for character voices, floating down there somewhere in the megaworld of the unconscious.

I was just outside and it hit me first and foremost that Gudrunlod is a witch. Lots of actresses do all manner of good and bad witches on TV these days (I think Mil’s watching “Charmed” at the moment) and being gorgeous women, they can be any kind of witch they like. I, on the other hand, am a hairy dude attempting ludicrous things like trying to sound like an eighteen year old girl/woman, daughter of a fallen magician. A feisty girl destined to become the world’s first Water Enchantress.

Most of the Rowan Canticles voices are pretty stock British Isles clones—Asmo, Hartco, Old Bretta, Big Gald—that are craftable from other voices I’ve used in the past in many stories. They people the world of Peloon, the Arbor Labyrinths, and the Rowan Hills. And so does Gudrunlod. She’s a worldly young woman, much more sophisticated than Asmo, the hero. Gudrunlod has never known her mother, which haunts her. She’s beautiful and hot blooded in a cool sort of way, avoiding the attentions of men she thinks are clods. She’s cynical, too, but like most cynical people is dying to be proved wrong. Deeply committed to learning magic from her aged father, she is schooled in herbs--hallucinogenic and otherwise--and has been taught by him the nature of Water-Knowing.

The best female character I’ve managed so far, I think, is young Nausicaa from The Odyssey. She is absolute flightiness. Very old fashioned portrayal, though. Gudrunlod’s voice gets nothing of the breathy or flighty. Yet there’s a vivacity in Nausicaa that I’d very much like to borrow for Gudrunlod. But only a little. Eventually there is sex in the story, so she’s got to be ready for that, too.

So now the task is to experiment. I’ve already figured out that by basically using a head voice-- a thin stream of air up from the lungs through a narrowed windpipe propelling it—and speaking only in the mouth with lots of lips, I can begin to get at least a basic tonality for her. A very different and new type of voice production for me it is, having spent no few hours being cyclopses, titans and burly sociopaths using very deep male voices.

But Gudrunlod lives in the light zone. Far above the open-lung resonating chamber approach to those sorts of characters. So, practice is in order. Therefore I’m walking around the woodshed talking to myself in this woman’s voice. If my neighbors didn’t think I was nuts until now I guess I’m lucky anyway, but still, it’s weird. I’m going to do it, though. Should be interesting.

--Odds