RonVitale.com

Welcome

What is RonVitale.com? RonVitale.com (formerly www.losoil.com) contains various samples of my writing over the years.  I've rummaged through the old files and decided to archive everything from the first story I wrote when only a young boy in grammar school (complete with crayon drawings!) to my most recent commentary and writing articles.  Losoil.com was named after Mohan the Wise's (a character in my novel "Dorothea's Song") magical tower.  In Losoil, there are many wonderful and amazing rooms filled with many exotic items.  I thought the name "Losoil" would adequately reflect my own writings over the last several years and would be a good namesake for this Website.
Definition: Losoil The name, translated from the ancient elvish, means Snowstar. Losoil is the name of Mohan the Wise's magical tower that I dreamed up when I wrote the first draft of my novel "Dorothea's Song" when I was 16 years old. Interested in seeing my hand drawn maps from back in the '80s? Be sure to visit the "The Realms" pages. Remember, I'm not an artist, but a writer. Be kind--I was only 16 years old when I drew those maps and typed up the descriptions.
Mission Having written a wide variety of pieces in the last several years, I wanted to consolidate my work onto my own Website, and share my writing with others. In time, I hope to add more sections that describe my novel "Dorothea's Song" and my second book "Amelion's Song" (currently at the first draft stage). I also wanted to create a Website in a blog format so that I could easily react and respond to current events, interesting news, or whatever else might catch my fancy.  So, welcome to Losoil.com and I invite you to explore my work. I've always believed that writing is an exercise in sharing one's vision with the world. No matter how polished or articulate a piece of writing may be, the author's transferal of his/her vision to the reader in order to inspire and engender thought-provoking discussion is the quintessential goal.  Of course, writing can also be just plain old fun. Enjoy.

Dorothea's Song

It's been a long time coming but I've finished creating Dorothea's Song into an audiobook for release on podiobooks.com. I'll be making the announcement soon, but I wanted to capture a moment in time to talk about the work. I started creating the files in June and finished in September. Three months of hard work: Working full time (and more), raising two kids with my wife, podcasting once a week for The Magic Sock podcast and then working on the audio novel.

A lot of hard work went into creating the audio files. The first episode will be released in early October (again more on that soon) and I'm looking forward to sharing the novel with the world. It should be very interesting. In looking back, I learned a lot about how to work on such a large project (I had to read, record, edit and convert to mp3 files over 470 pages of text). Such a project isn't for the faint of heart.

The logistics were daunting as I realized early on that my original goal of completing everything by Sept. 1st wasn't possible.

Some times I worked on editing the files on the weekend at 5am in the morning while other times I started recording or editing after 9pm at night. Having a large chunk of time just wasn't possible unless I woke up before the kids on the weekend.

Now I'm on to the next phases of the project. I just finished editing the promo for the book and hope to share it with other podcasters late this year. And of course, I need to start working on the print version of the book that will be available at Lulu.com. But for now: I need a break. One important lesson that I've learned is that you can't complete such a large project all in one day. Of course, if you have no kids and have tons of free time maybe that's possible, but if you're thinking of putting together a similar project some words of advice: Be realistic with your goals.

More info is to come. Stay tuned in the next weeks.

Lenka: The Show

Just a fun video to spice up some the day up. Enjoy!

The Work Goes On

I started recording my novel to put up online as an audibook back in June 2008 (ha, I just made a typo and typed in 2088. You know it feels like it's been that long) and I have one episode left to go. It's September 2008 now and I've just one episode left to record, edit and then convert to a mp3 and add the ID3 tags (and image). My wife is helping me out by reading the novel one last time to offer her proofreading help. It's funny how many times I've read the novel over the years and each time I read it I find more mistakes. But I guess that's to be expect. I originally wrote the novel back in the mid '80s and then rewrote it around 2000. Now it's 2008 and I'm nearly finished in turning it into an audiobook and then I'll create a book on Lulu.com. I just haven't had enough time. But still the work goes on. I keep at it. Now it's dinner time. Time to rest. It's been a long day. I started recording episode 14 at 5:15am and about 4 pages until I finished Audacity crashed on me. I lost everything. I pulled up the temp files and found the 748 files that were 10 seconds long and realized that it would take me longer to put them all back together again than it would for me to read the chapter over again. I read it a second time and just finished editing it. Episode 14 is complete. One to go.

I'm tired. It's been a long day. I need rest. Peace.