Dragons Without Borders: Proceeds to Benefit “Silence is the Enemy”
Well, well, well! Look at this! Writing has been polished, scary new things have been done with microphones (oh shush, you), and mad panic and Wild Disclaiming has been engaged in in public…and now it’s time.
I’m telling you, if this wasn’t for a good cause I’d have scared myself out of it ten times by now. But Silence is the Enemy is an important cause on so many levels:
- it seeks to raise awareness on a global scale about the problem of mass rape in war-torn countries, which, if successful, could save the lives and mental health of thousands upon thousands of innocent women and girls;
- it funnels money to Doctors Without Borders, one of the very few organizations providing front-line medical and crisis care for the victims of this and other atrocities;
- and it’s making the point, and giving us all a chance to get behind the point, that rape is not okay no matter what. Even when the women affected are dirt poor, brown-skinned adolescents - people the media would have us believe are the least newsworthy people in the world, just about - it’s still not okay and we are not okay with letting it pass in silence.
For many of us in the global community, supporting the Silence is the Enemy movement is the best chance we’ve ever had to step up and make it known that we are not okay with letting these rapes go ignored, and that we are not willing to do nothing, even when the governments and the media of the world have provided us with basically no options for speaking up or helping out. I, for one, am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to have a chance to meaningfully speak up.
So that’s what I’ve done - spoken up. I’ve never recorded an audio version of one of my stories before, and in spite of having been published in print several times, let me tell ya, this was pretty terrifying. But the nice thing about an opportunity like this is that even if my performance is awful and ruins my chances to ever work in audio format again, it’ll still have been worth it. Yay!
Here it is, then - my previously-unpublished story, titled DRAGONS WITHOUT BORDERS, in DRM-free MP3 format here and OGG format here. (The .mp3 file is almost twice the size, FYI. They’re both high-quality recordings, and thank you again to my husband for the fantastic editing work!)
The story runs nearly half an hour. Let me know if you like it!
I’m not setting a price for this piece, though obviously I put quite a few hours of work into it. Instead, I’m providing this handy “DONATE” button below, and I’m asking you to please give what you can afford. I will pass all of the proceeds along to Doctors Without Borders in the name of the Silence is the Enemy campaign. You can donate using your PayPal account or any credit card.
If you can’t donate anything, please consider posting a link to this in your blog, journal, Twitter feed or what have you.
Thanks, everyone! It’s meant a lot to me personally to be able to do this. I really appreciate your attention and support.
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.