Tag: proofreading

Proof Positive

Posted in Art, Awakening, Book, Cover Art, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Ridley Park, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Mates, the proofing process was Hell. I even count the number of times I reviewed my book, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. Then I sent it out to a couple of Beta readers, one of whom went over and above and did some proofreading, which I appreciated. I made some amends, and I ordered a proof.

The proof arrived relatively quickly—even without expedited shipping, which would have been more than twice the price of the book.

Lessons Learnt

  • Get a proof copy of your book
    Don’t skip this step. It’s inexpensive and is key to assessing formatting issues. It is also an opportunity for last-minute proofreading. I discovered probably 4-dozen nits that slipped through the cracks.
    • Layout
      In one case, I had an indefinite article (a) orphaned at the end of a line. I entered a soft return to get it to start on the next line to enhance readability.
    • Cover Art
      Silly me. I designed and composited the cover, and I didn’t hide the bounding rectangles I used to reference how my cover, back, and spine present. My proof copy has these rectangles in place. It’s not a huge issue, but it is an aesthetic flaw that I corrected.
    • Major Misses
      This is not as likely to happen to most authors, but this books began its life as four or five short stories that were in the same universe on a shared timeline, so I decided to add connective tissue and create a novel. The problem is that the short stories were set in Bristol, London, and Manchester, but I needed to set the novel in a single location, and I chose Manchester. A beta reader noticed that I even though the story was in Manchester, I left a scene having a character reflecting on the Thames, which is a feature of London. I changed it. Unfortunately, there where two instances. I was lazy, and I changed the instance they pointed out to a generic ‘river’, but I left another instance as ‘the Thames’. Oopsie.
    • References
      Another issue I caught is again fairly unique. I wrote out a male character and offloaded his scenes to a female character. I decided that I didn’t have enough material and differentiation for the two characters. It sounded good at the start, but he didn’t make the final cut. The problem is that I missed a few ‘his’ to ‘her’ pronoun swaps. Oops.
    • Punctuation
      Man, I missed a lot of question marks and a few commas. Nothing major, but it matters.
    • Spelling
      OK. Not too many here, but I had swapped a wonder for a wander that I missed the first hundred times through.
    • Spacing
      Again, minor formatting issue. The biggest offender was rogue spaces between en-dashes and trailing commas: – , instead of –,. It’s a little thing.
    • Tenses and POV
      This book was written in third-person, present, limited, deep point of view. Or that was the goal. All too often, I would slip into past tense. In some cases, it might have been OK, but I edited a lot back into present tense.

      I also switched several times out of limited into omniscient. To be honest, I left some of this alone.

      I was also guilty of some incidental head-hopping. Sue me. It happens.
    • Create Your Audiobook First
      OMG. I thought I was done, but I found so many small issues when I was forced to micro-focus for the audio version. It helped so much. I have been told to read your book out loud—advice I follow—, but I still uncovered a treasure trove of mistakes in the audio version. Moreover, some things that didn’t sound awkward earlier, now did, so I had the opportunity to change it up.
    • Last Minute Amends
      As it happens—in line with the audio version advice—, feel free to make more substantial content amends. My favourite one. When I heard this line during an audio review—I was literally listening in bed—, I got up and changed it immediately.
      • Before: When they arrive at the compound all is quiet except for the crickets that pause to listen.
      • After: When they arrive at the compound all is quiet except for the occasional cricket.
    • Obviously, crickets pausing to listen are also quiet, so…
  • Give yourself time enough time to do a thorough review
    I set a 1 March release date, so I left myself plenty of runway to take off.
  • Be patient
    Even though I gave myself plenty of time for review and amends, I rushed the process and approved a book that wasn’t ready for approval and had to do late revisions.

I”ve probably not mentioned some, but I had the opportunity to fix each of these mistakes, so I’ll bookmark this page and my next book will be that much easier to publish.

French-English Content in Word

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It seems that spelling and grammar checking in Microsoft Word might use some improvement.

Here is a segment from a chapter from the first draft of Hemo Sapiens: Origin. Notice the last paragraph. I’ve written some dialogue in French with a tag in English. followed by more dialogue in English. This is my attempt to provide guidance to readers who don’t read French, so they can still maintain the context The problem is that Word doesn’t do a great job of accepting language markers. In this case, ‘notifies’ is underlined as being incorrect because Word, despite being informed otherwise, sees this as being French.

I wish I could just highlight a phrase and select the language from a context menu. Up front, I could specify that I am using languages X, Y, and Z, so I am not burdened with a laundry list of language options.

Another interesting thing to me is that there are separate auto-correct dictionaries per language. This makes sense, but it creates a burden to have to signify the language to let Word know which one to use. In my case, I tend to add accented words to autocorrect because I use a standard English-language QWERTY keyboard, and Windows/Word doesn’t make compounding diacritical marks very easy.

For example, a common entry might be ‘bien sûr’ for ‘bien sur’. I also get guillemets « » from << and >>, respectively.

Sadly, the ‘Detect language automatically’ feature isn’t very reliable either, so I leave it unchecked instead of having it misidentify languages.

I just noticed a typo in the screen shot. Word missed that ‘belonging’ should be plural, but probably thinks it’s a verb rather than a noun. Other AI tools make similar semantic errors.

Reading Aloud

Posted in Awakening, Book, ElevenLabs, ElevenLabs, Generative AI, hemo sapiens, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, WritingTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Or is that ‘reading allowed?’ I’m all but done with my first draft of Hemo Sapiens, so I’m recording is chapter by chapter so I can listen to it. Listening uses different cognitive processes beyond the obvious sensory apparatus, so one catches different sorts of factors.

For me as an example, it helps me to capture pacing. When I scan my own work at this stage, I’ve read it so many times, it’s difficult to read critically. I sort of just gloss over the words in a perfunctory manner. Maybe that’s just me, but…

What I do is listen whilst I read along—sort of like in grade school: read silently whilst someone reads aloud. This is what it gets me:

  1. Clumsy phrasing. It felt ok when I wrote it, but doesn’t read particularly well.
  2. Repeat words written nearby. I try to avoid placing the same word in the same paragraph or to close in adjoining paragraphs. In this case, I used and character’s surname name near the end of a paragraph and then at the start at the next, It really caught my ear, so I changed the later one to a subject pronoun.
  3. Spelling. Yep, spelling and grammar checkers still miss things. For me, some of my dialogue it either text-speak, BRB, or truncated, ‘That ain’t for nuttin”, so I often Word to ignore spelling until I’m ready. Though it isn’t necessarily revealed by the audio portion, I tend to track audio word by word, whilst I tend to read in paragraphs.
  4. Typos and wrong words. Listening along yesterday, I noticed that I missed a pronoun change resulting from removing a male character and expanding a female character. A remnant ‘his’ needed to be amended to ‘her’.
  5. Dense (or sparse) paragraphs. This is also about pacing. When listening, one can pick up that a passage just drags unnecessarily. It may need to be written, or it might just need to be broken up or re-punctuated. If it feels too fast that it might give the reader seizures, perhaps toss in a few dialogue tags or descriptors.

Perhaps I could come up with more, but these make my top of mind list.

I use ElevenLabs AI speech synthesis to convert my content from text to speech. I’ve written about my ElevenLabs wish list before. For the plan I use, I get 100,000 characters per month and can exceed that limit by purchasing 1,000 word blocks. I don’t the overage to be cost-effective, so I’d only ever use it in a pinch. The next plan is for a 500,000 word block, but the economics don’t work for me there either. Usually, it’s no big deal. Unless I am using it to narrate a novel, I just wait for the month to roll over and I can pick up where I left off. Fortuitously enough for me, I recorded 11 chapters yesterday before i ran out, and my plan refreshes today, so easy peasy.

ElevenLabs charges by the character, not by the word, which does make sense, but it’s not how I think about writing. I tend to think in terms of words or pages. When they say character count, they mean it—punctuation, quotes, and apostrophes, spaces, and carriage returns. I have discovered ways to reduce spaces, but you need to be careful, because it also uses punctuation to control some elements of prosody and delivery. For example, if you remove all of the commas and full stops, the delivery will be a ramble. For those who still double-space after double stops, this will cost you. Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly frugal, I remove the carriage returns. They don’t seem to have any effect on the output, and it saves characters. It wouldn’t make for a great reading experience, but the AI doesn’t care.