Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Okay, so the copy edit is complete. One more hill climbed, another mountain ahead. I have started the read aloud proofing pass, and am 5.5 to 7% of the way through that, depending on criteria chosen. No graphical representation employed. So far I have added and removed equal numbers of commas (two), and made minor changes for meaning or flow, and one minor continuity fix that was possibly not needed. But really it was, hahahaha!

That last manic laugh shows that this here is the last chance for the demon of perfectionism to come to call, and I can’t lie, it was whispering in my ear as I inexpertly narrated my story. I am proud to say that on two to three occasions I told it to take a hike and did not stop to agonize over a minor stylistic point, or change a word because it had been recently used, which regular readers will know was part of my obsessive editing hell with The Killer and The Dead. Sometimes you just let words be, and changing it to be different will just signpost both that word and the previous one you are trying not to repeat, thus in fact becoming the distraction you sought to avoid. The Streisand effect in writing.  

Common words be common, let them say hello regularly in their usual context and nobody will care. This is what I say to myself as the demon of perfectionism cackles on my shoulder trying to infect me with its disbelief. So far, I have stayed strong. I will ask my wife about one sentence though, just to be sure. She writes for a living (unlike me, hoho!), so can be relied upon to tell me if I misused a that, and changed meaning. I think it did, but don’t care as the obvious meaning shines through in context over the narrow grammatical interpretation. Sometimes you have to trust in colloquial understandings. Most people do not read like grammarians. To those of you who do, I apologize.

My friendly demon also winces and hisses when I stumble in my narration, telling me it must be the writing, not that I’m crap at reading things aloud. So I go back and read again, and look to see if I really need to change phrasing to make things easier to comprehend. To comprehend, not to read aloud. Reading and performing are different activities, and I suspect that most of my readers will not be sitting on the subway declaiming my story in thrilling stage-projected tones. (Would anyone now stop them? I doubt it – ignoring each other and crazies on the subway is an art form.) What I’m looking for are words that aren’t needed, for seemingly benign but wrongly inserted autocorrects, and for good old fashioned typos. (None of the last two so far, which is nice, but it is very early days.) I have trimmed a tiny bit of extraneous fat here and there, but in general, even with my narration skills, I have been enjoying the read so far, and got a rush or two from early events. Sweet.

Of course this does make me wish there was an easy and cheap way to get my books on Audible. I’d love to narrate them myself, but as indicated above, I mostly suck, or would become the ultimate ham when attempting to convey drama. I shall leave it alone, and concentrate on writing, not reading!

So the lesson for this week? (Not that I am someone to take lessons from.) Ignore the demon of perfectionism and trust in your voice, even if it seems to stumble sometimes. Until next time, my friends!