If you're like me, everything you hear literally goes in one ear and out the other. Not kidding!
When I was a youngster, my mom would give us three kids (me and my two younger brothers) oral directions. "Clean up your room, put your dirty clothes in the laundry, and put your clean clothes where they belong. If you get all your chores done, you can have a treat.
Well, guess who was always last in the treat line. Yep. You guessed it. Me!
It wasn't because I was stubborn...although I was...and it wasn't because I was lazy...because I wasn't. It was because I literally can't remember a whole lot of things if I'm just listening. When I got older and could question that weirdness about me, I heard about a test to measure a person's learning aptitude. So, I took the test to measure whether I was an audio learner or a visual learner. (This was way before the VARK Model was adapted in the nineties. Remember, I'm old.
Anyway, I found that I was a 95% visual learner which means if you tell me something, I. Will. Not. Remember. It. That is unless I write it down. That doesn't mean I have to keep what I wrote down. It isn't like I have to read my list to remember. No, there is something about the act of writing things down that helps my memory retain things. I can close my eyes, see my notes, and practically read what I wrote down. This was a great skill in school. I could write down my study notes and bullet point the pertinent information, then on test day I could read/remember almost everything. Enough so, I made A's in school. Well, that is until college. As you can probably guess, there was a whole new set of learning handicaps in college. Curfew, cowboys, and Coca-Cola. (Wink, wink)
As a visual learner, I figure that's just the way the Good Lord put me together. I can't change it so I just roll with it, and I've got a closet full of notebooks to prove it. But I do know that there are as many combinations of learning styles as there are people in the world. That's why I didn't hesitate to have every single one of my books converted into an audiobook. I'm not great at listening to audiobooks. I start in at Chapter One and before I know it, I'm in Chapter Four and have no idea how I got there because my brain is runnin' a mile-a-minute on a whole bunch of other stuff. But I also know that just because I struggle to stay tuned, that doesn't mean there aren't people out there who love them. And I would feel just awful if I left you out. So, I now have paperback and audiobooks for every e-book I've published.
Now that you know that, here's a link to a sample of Grace, Book One of my Brides of the Rio Grande six-book series. Use my chat box and let me know what you think. Click here to be taken to the book page and the audio of Chapter One.
