It has taken longer than I had hoped to finish reading Star Kings aloud; for text, for story/content, for performance. Weather, health, family obligations, other interruptions to my so limited creative time.  But the reading is done, and now I will do a text-to-speech. 

It has been recommended several times that the writer have someone read the story aloud, to catch things the writer would not otherwise see. That might work for short fiction, but finding someone to read Star Kings for me would be a bit of problem. The text is something over 137,000 words, nobody I know has that kind of time, and I haven’t found any way to hire someone to read aloud for me, all in one go, and I’m not sure I would like it anyway. I have used text-to-speech software, and it works. Despite all the times I’ve read the manuscript (typescript?) it still finds lots of little errors that I’ve missed.

It has also been suggested that I hire a professional freelance editor. That is way beyond my budget, at about $40 per hour, at about ten pages per hour, at about 550 pages, given a standard 250 words per page. That’s $2,200. Not counting how long it would actually take. Not counting how well the editor might understand what I’ve done. I’ve had editors make egregious assumptions, and make totally unacceptable “corrections.” Story on request.

I find characters easy. They all live in my head, as it were, and I come to know them as I write. But description, narration, and sometimes even flow of plot are hard for me. It’s the problems with those aspects which I find while reading, silent or aloud, that must be fixed. So, aside from my apparent talent with characters and dialogue, everything else is an acquired skill, and what needs to be fixed takes a long time.

The standards which I have set for myself have become higher than they were even ten years ago. I do not judge other writers by my standards. There really is no comparison. My standards concern my use of my acquired skills, which standards I apply to whatever irregularities I find. I am not aware of these irregularities until I read my story aloud, maybe for a third or fourth time.

Getting it right is important to me. There are lots of times when I find a tiny glitch in what I’ve written, and I’m tempted to say, “Ah, it’s good enough.” Then I read it again. And then I decide to fix it. Maybe I’m obsessed with it, but “good enough” isn’t good enough. It has to be right, or at least as good as I can make it.

After this comes formatting. Sigh.