Life, Writing, Weirdness

A thought occurred to me recently regarding what is usually the final draft of a story for me (Footnote 1). That draft has me read the story out loud to make sure I haven’t missed anything that needs to be fixed. If I can’t get a sentence out verbally, it probably needs some kind of adjustment. Alternately, sometimes I catch small continuity issues as I read something. “Oh, that’s not right.”

And there’s the idea that I’ve wanted to do some podcast fiction for a long time

Putting those things together, I have to wonder, if I read things out loud for a final draft, why am I not recording that?

I have a decent microphone (two actually), so perhaps it’s time to start building up a library. Whether it gets podcasted or not is a different question, but once I have enough recorded, what will the reason be to not do it?

Sure, I’ll have to find editing time since there will almost have to be some substantial audio editing at some point. Every time I stop to fix something while reading is going to interrupt the flow of the story so that will need to be tidied up, and the longer things get the more likely there are things to tidy and the longer that will take. But I’m already spending the base recording time and not recording.

But now the time I find for that final draft has to be quiet time, and that’s harder. I live in a busy, crowded house. There are six of us here and true quiet is hard to come by. I am up earlier than the rest of the house in general, so it might just be a matter of rearranging my mornings a bit.

And I have been meaning to convert the small closet in my small office into a miniature recording studio. Perhaps it’s time to get that project off the ground, too.

Be well, everyone.

Footnote 1: I’ve covered this elsewhere, but to recap, not counting pre-writing, I usually work on a four-draft process. First = get the story out of my skull. Second = fix what’s broken. Third = make it pretty. Fourth/Final = read it aloud to make sure I haven’t missed anything.