Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 85

Text-to-Speech – a new way to proofread

Here’s a tip for you writers out there. I’m trying a new technique for proofreading my latest Cliff Knowles Mystery: text-to-speech software. I opted for the free Panopreter Basic reader. Of course it produces a clunky computer voice, not a human-sounding one, but I expected that. If you use one of the paid versions, you have choices of voices and other features. This one delivers ads in the interface, but I ignore them. I don’t even know what’s being advertised since I never look at that window.

Since I write in Microsoft Word, my file has a docx extension. The reader requires another format, but it accepts several, including doc and txt. I use txt. Simply open up the application, click Input and Speak, and select your file from the menu. Your file’s text will appear in the main window.  Click the Speak button in the lower left and the voice (Microsoft Anna) begins to read. There are sliders to adjust volume and speed. Don’t set it too fast. It’s tempting to try to get through the proofreading chore as fast as possible, but you will miss things if you go faster than a leisurely pace. You are doing this to catch mistakes. I am amazed at how much easier it is to notice a mistake read aloud to me than it is to see it when reading. I’ve been catching a lot of errors this way.

The software is far from perfect. Getting used to the odd cadence of the voice is the hardest part. It will take some patience to use it. For example, if the word no appears at the end of a sentence, with a period after it, (like “She shook her head no.”) the software reads it as “number.” This makes for some funny dialogue. If a series of digits is four digits without a comma, like 2016, it reads it correctly as a date, and if it is preceded by a $ then it correctly recites the word “dollars” after the amount, but it pronounces Roman numerals weirdly and the word “is” always comes out as “eyes.” Since I write murder mysteries, the word homicide appears frequently. The software sometimes pronounces it right, but most of the time it comes out as “domicide” for some reason. There are many other anomalies. You can pause the reading to make a correction in your original file, but so far as I can tell, you can’t back up or fast forward to another location, at least not in the free version. If you shut it down, it will start at the beginning again. You can, however, save it as a .wav file and then you can navigate through that with any media player. I don’t bother with that. I just save my original in text files of ten to fifteen pages at a time and play them all the way through.

Still, you can’t beat the price, and it’s a lot faster than a paid proofreader, too. So expect my seventh Cliff Knowles Mystery, A Will to Die, soon. Unfortunately, it won’t be out by Christmas, but if you don’t get one of the items on your wish list for Christmas, you can treat yourself to this one in the new year.

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Present Darkness by Malla Nunn

Present Darkness by Malla Nunn

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is from the wrong side of the tracks – the South African tracks, that is. He is a white man living with a colored woman in the apartheid era. A white married couple is murdered and their daughter identifies two black students as the murderers. Cooper realizes quickly that the girl is lying but doesn’t know why. The white police lieutenant seizes on the identification as a quick solve of a heinous crime. It is up to Cooper to ferret out the truth.

The setting, both geographic and cultural, is esoteric and interesting to western readers; at least it was to me. However, that’s about all I can say this book has going for it. The plot was predictable and the characters hackneyed. Zulu detective Shabalala is ripped from the pages of the comic books – magically able to track anyone or anything, move absolutely silently despite near superhuman size and strength, and having that native intuition that can tell when anyone is lying. The doctor with them can cure anyone of anything with whatever is at hand – a shoestring, a jar of honey. Cooper’s inherent goodness can convince anyone to trust him 100% and cooperate with the police regardless of personal risk and can take any amount of beating or torture without revealing critical information. The bad guys are so obvious that they might as well have appeared with a neon sign on their heads from the first page where they were introduced and of course have not a single redeeming characteristic. I expected a “bwa-ha-ha” at any moment. There is no mystery here. You know how it’s going to play out from around page 10; at least I did.

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Mystereity Reviews Behead Me

I just got this really nice review of Behead Me by Tammy of Mystereity Reviews and had to share it. It’s nice to know that it appeals to non-geocachers as much as it does to geocachers.

Behead Me by Russell Atkinson

Retired FBI agent Cliff Knowles is hired by a company to investigate possible theft of proprietary industrial plans, an investigation that leads him to shady business dealings, danger, and even murder.

Before you ask, Behead Me refers to a word puzzle. No blood and guts here, Behead Me is an engaging and absorbing mystery that will quickly draw you in and keep you turning pages. Cliff is an unflappable investigator, and I enjoyed how his methodology was neatly laid out. This wasn’t one of those super-cop-hunches kind of solves, it was a realistic procedural, and I really enjoyed how Cliff ferreted out the smallest details and connected them to another case, and the presidential pardon sub-plot was heartwarming and added some human dimension to the story. Cliff’s geo-caching adventure in the desert and the high speed chase at the end added a lot of action kept me on the edge of my seat.

I haven’t read the other books in the series, so I can safely say that this book can be read as a standalone, or as an entry into the series. The few references to prior books were minor and didn’t cause any confusion.

Overall, Behead Me is an intriguing and fascinating read and I definitely recommend it for fans of mysteries and procedurals.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review

Behead Me is available at book retailers or online at Amazon  | Barnes & Noble

Series: Cliff Knowles #6

Rating:★★★★★ 5 stars

Publication Date: February 23,2016

Language: English
Formats: Kindle/Paperback

ISBN: 9781530039401

ASIN: B01C3QLX72

Genre: Mystery/Suspense

Reviewer: Tam (Mystereity Reviews

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The Author’s Life

Adam@Home courtesy GoComics.com

Sigh. How I sympathize with Adam. So far I’ve only had a typo on the cover once. Fortunately, it was on the back cover in the “About the Author” section. A sentence was repeated. If you have one of those copies, someday when I’m posthumously famous, it may be as valuable as those stamps with the airplane printed upside down. As for typos in the interior … I think they reproduce forever.

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Three under-the radar comedies worth watching

For Thanksgiving I will depart from my usual book reviews. The last two or three books I started turned out to be flops, so I didn’t read enough of them to do a review. Instead I’m going to mention three television comedies that I’ve discovered. Okay, I’ve discovered along with a few million others, probably, but I don’t see or hear anything about these in the press or social media, so I think they are somewhat under the radar. I can put two of these in the guilty pleasure category as they are things that sound like they are (because they actually are) in the weird to tacky range. Here they are in order of overall quality.

Life in Pieces This CBS screwball comedy is so well-written it’s amazing it ever made it to the screen. The first big plus: there’s no laugh track. A laugh track is a sign of a failed comedy. I will never watch any show with a laugh track; a live audience is okay, though. LIP is a family comedy much along the lines of Modern Family. The scene shifts from the patriarchal family unit to the children’s, but that’s where the similarities end. The half-hour show is split into four vignettes, each focused on one family unit. In essence, it’s a series of skits. This is its second season, which says something about about its quality right there, since few comedies make it past season 1. The acting all good, too, but the absolute best in my opinion is Zoe Lister-Jones who plays the wife of Collin Hanks’ character. Her comic timing and deadpan one-liners are spot on.

Son of Zorn The first guilty pleasure is this off-the-wall live person-animation hybrid from Fox. Zorn is the Hulk-sized muscle-bound animated sword-wielding fantasy hero whose live action ex-wife (played by Cheryl Hines) is now engaged to a mild-mannered doctor. Zorn’s teenage son (Johnny Pemberton) has his father’s animated legs, which he attempts to conceal in gym class. Zorn has returned from the kingdom of Zephyria where he slayed dragons and whatnot to reconnect with his son who lives in suburban Orange County. Zorn takes a job working in a call center and thinks his female boss is a man because, well, bosses are always men. Zorn’s natural proclivity toward violence and magic spells keeps him in constant trouble. The premise is completely wacky but somehow it works, once again due to top-notch writing. Pemberton is terrific as the beleaguered Alan and Jason Sudeikis does a superb job voicing Zorn.

People of Earth The even guiltier pleasure is POE. I’ve only seen the first two episodes of this, so it could go south on me, but it’s clever enough to interest my wife and me. It centers on a support group for alien abductees. The main character, played by Wyatt Cenac, is a journalist who was doing a story on this obviously crazy group when he himself is abducted. It has been compared to (inspired by?)  the “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” novel series, written by Douglas Adams. The absence of a laugh track and the low-key performance by Cenac are enough to keep it on our series record list, but the other characters seem rather like one-dimensional stereotypes. Ultimately the writing will make or break this series.

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Interview with The Writing Greyhound

I had a nice author interview with Laura of The Writing Greyhound.

Thursday, 17 November 2016



Interview: Russell Atkinson

Russ Atkinson, author of the Cliff Knowles Mysteries series, has stopped by The Writing Greyhound to answer a few questions about Behead Me, the sixth book in the series.

Firstly, tell me a little about yourself and your background.

I’m a retired FBI agent and lawyer living in California, the Silicon Valley area. My hobbies include finger-style guitar, geocaching, and cipher solving. I’m the past president of the American Cryptogram Association and I was the Head Cryptographer for the movie The Red Machine.

 

See the rest Here:

The Writing Greyhound

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Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This review applies only to the audio recording version. I got only as far as track 3 on disk 1. The obnoxious screechy voice of the narrator was so horrible I couldn’t stand it any longer and turned it back in to the library. I have no idea whether the story itself is any good, although the beginning was less than auspicious. If you want to give it a try, I strongly recommend a print version.

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A Midsummer’s Equation by Keigo Higashino

A Midsummer’s Equation by Keigo Higashino

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hari Cove is a small seaside town southwest of Tokyo. The Kawahata family, a mother, father, and 30-year-old daughter Narumi, runs an inn there that has seen better days. Narumi’s young cousin Kyohei comes to stay for a while during summer vacation. It’s past the tourist season and the inn has only two guests, a physicist there for a conference about drilling for minerals in the cove, and Tsukuhara, a retired detective from the Tokyo Police Department. The detective ends up dead, his body on the rocks over the sea wall. At first it’s thought to have been an accident, but it is soon found to be carbon monoxide poisoning. The mystery begins there and four groups start investigating: the Hari police, the prefectural police (more or less equivalent to state police), the Tokyo police, who believe the death may be related to a case he once had, and the physicist aided by young Kyohei. Yukawa, the physicist, it turns out, is known to the police as Galileo, a nickname, and is the brains of the outfit. He has helped the police before. The groups don’t always share their information with each other so we are seeing parallel investigations go on and get clues from each.

This is exactly my kind of book: a true whodunit solved with brainwork. The plot is devilishly clever and the suspense builds slowly as we get more clues that lead to the surprise ending. The reader is given a fair chance to solve it himself (or herself). There is no wasted space; every scene turns out to be important. The plethora of Japanese names may confuse the western reader, but it helped that I spent a few months in Japan as an exchange student. Re-experiencing that culture was a big plus for me with this book. I also liked that there was no foul language, gore, or sadism/cruelty.

I’m very impressed with the translation. It seems very smooth, colloquial and credible, as though written originally by a native English speaker. I thought this book was great and I’m giving it my top rating.

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Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

This book revealing the endemic racism in American society of yesteryear seems especially timely right now, although that’s purely coincidental.

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In an antebellum Missouri a slave woman who is only 1/16 black has a child by a white man. At the same time, the mistress of the house gives birth to another baby and dies. Roxy, the slave/mother, raises both while the absentee father can’t tell them apart. She switches the two babies, both blond and blue eyed, during infancy so that her baby will grow up with the privileges of a white man and not be sold down the river. Her scheme backfires since her son grows up to be a nasty, spoiled character who despises her. The white baby ends up as a kitchen slave.

If this were a modern novel the “black” baby, known as Tom throughout most of the book, would turn out to be a fine stalwart young man in order to show that African-Americans are just as inherently intelligent and of as good character as whites. Political correctness would dictate it. Instead, Roxy and, apparently, Twain, attribute Tom’s evil character to that word-a-white-guy-can’t-say blood. The book is a tough read because of the blatant bigotry and unappealing characters. Tom is by far the main character, yet the book is named after the secondary character, a white lawyer, who eventually uncovers the truth. Perhaps these choices were mandated by the political correctness of the day, but they still grate. Even so, Twain is known to historians as an adamant abolitionist.

Perhaps I had a romanticized recollection of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which I think I read as a child, but I may even be remembering the Disney movies. I thought Twain was satirizing the racism and humanizing the black characters in those, and perhaps he was, but the same cannot be said for this one. It is also just not as well-written as those. Wikipedia attributes this to the rush of his impending bankruptcy, but critics seem to agree with me that it is poor from a stylistic standpoint. Even so, it serves as a stark reminder of how far we’ve come in the area of civil rights, and perhaps suggests that we could do better than we have.

The reader did an excellent job despite how difficult it must have been to speak the racially offensive dialect with appropriate enthusiasm and sincerity.

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A Ragtime Nightmare – guitar arrangement

Okay, not everybody can be Ton Van Bergeyk, but if you love ragtime guitar as I do you can find a way to play some of his masterpieces. I had no chance of playing it as written on the tab, so I simplified it enough so that I could hack it out but it’s still fiendishly difficult, at least for me. You sure don’t see a lot of other guitarists putting up videos of this piece, so I don’t feel so bad that I’m sloppier on this one than on my other videos. I learned this years ago, but let it go forgotten for a long time until I revived it recently. This is my Taro resonator. The tuning is drop D. If you want to see and hear the full arrangement played flawlessly search the name Johnson Hogg on YouTube.

A Ragtime Nightmare by Tom Turpin

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