Samantha, Read to Me

No, not you, Albert!

Friends, I have finished line edits on my novel. :) I have done it with the help of Samantha. I’ll get to who that is, later in this post.

At the time of my previous newsletter, I’d just submitted my revisions. As of today, my editor and I have gone back and forth several times fixing things up a bit more, and the manuscript is finally in the hands of its copyeditor.

And I am also so happy to share that both of my kids are finally getting back to health. At least for now.

So, I know that I keep announcing that “edits are done” on this newsletter, ha; sorry if that is confusing! It takes several rounds of edits to get a book ready for publication. Line edits are the more micro-level edits on a novel. They are often more focused on language, word choice, and style. Prior to line edits, I had worked on larger, structural edits - adding chapters, cutting scenes, weaving in character and thematic details. Those larger structural edits comprised several rounds of back and forth between February and May, several versions of the manuscript, and a few Zoom conversations with my editors. Line edits were a bit more straightforward, as they are less creative, per se. Or at least: they don’t require so many slashing changes to the word doc and page count. Of course, they too require several rounds of back and forth. My line edits were done in one (crazy) month’s time.

Despite finishing line edits during one of the more stressful periods of my life, I have to say that it was actually a blessing to have these edits to work on during the bouts of illness, my own illness, and my kids’ hospitalizations and visits. I mean, of course I didn’t do work while living on the hospital couch. But when the kids were recuperating at home, I had a reason to leave for short periods of time, a reason to push aside the anxiety of fevers and rashes and coughs for a while and immerse myself in language. In the hopeful endeavor of creating something beautiful. In the happy, anticipatory work of making my novel better. Yes, I still pinch myself, still find myself in joyful disbelief that my novel is coming out next year.

After working through all of my editor’s suggestions, I decided that I wanted to read the book again, from start to finish. But also, that idea itself was just exhausting. And I guess, haha, a little bit boring. I mean, I’ve read this thing so many times, especially in the past year. I thought, maybe I’ll read the book out loud this time, for a different experience. In fact, I do do this when I write and revise. I read aloud to myself in a British accent that helps me get a little extra distance from my “voice” ^^.

But reading the whole novel out loud felt daunting. So I decided to give Microsoft Word’s “Read Aloud” function a try. It was my first time doing so! It was very helpful, very awkward, and very silly.

For example, whenever you open the doc and click on Read Aloud, it defaults to its original settings, which means that it gives you the voice option that’s on top of the alphabetical list. That voice is “Albert.” Albert’s voice is as dry and as raspy as that of an 85-year-old lifetime-chain-smoking lymphoma survivor. It surprises (startles) every time. I have to manually switch to Samantha: the most normal of all the robotic voices.

Samantha is the least abrasive voice on the list, but that doesn’t mean she reads naturally. The function is still weird, and the variations in pitch and intonation are often a little bit off. For example, in question sentences, only the very last word is raised in pitch. So interrogations read like monotone declarations, up until the last word. Do you want some tea? Where do you want to go for Christmas vacation? These are not real sentences in my novel. But I think you get the point.

This strange, surprising, and incorrect reading of my novel was actually helpful, though. I found myself paying more attention. In the end, I found quite a handful of edits I needed to make. And this was after I’d gone through the novel twice already and thought I was done with edits.

Read Aloud is both surprisingly good and surprisingly bad at foreign languages. My novel incorporates phrases of Chinese (Mandarin and Shanghainese), French, and Japanese. Occasionally, when the app got to a foreign word, Samantha disappeared, someone who sounded like a Jacques suddenly came out of the blue, and read to me in perfect French. Or a young woman who sounded more like a Jing than a Jenny would suddenly replace Samantha and read the phrase in perfect putonghua. These moments were automatic, unexpected, delightful, but ultimately, rare. Most of the time, Samantha - American, monolingual Samantha - would read a string of Japanese or French and it would come out a messy jumble.

One of my main character’s Japanese names is mispronounced by a good portion of readers. I’d never thought too much of it; I would correct the ambiguity and then move on. But, after spending hours for days on end listening to Samantha repeatedly mispronouncing it, I realized I should put in a clue to the name’s pronunciation somewhere in the book. Otherwise every other reader would read it wrong.

So thank you to Samantha, and to the frightening Albert, for your help! Even though you insist on calling me Hooli Min. I sometimes joke with my husband that I was lucky to sell a book this year; no one can accuse me of using AI to help me write this novel. But in my time of need, at least these silly Microsoft Word robots came through to help.

Onward! Copyedits at the end of the summer. And then we’ll be talking about things like proofs and passes. :)