Audiobooks & Text to Voice Proofing

I became an audiobook addict for a single reason: I don't much like reading on a screen and, living in Vietnam, having books shipped to me is problematic. Customs and the Ministry of Culture 'inspect' them to make sure you aren't reading anything that's bad for you.

So, being able to download audiobooks directly off the internet has become a very convenient way for me to get my fiction hit without being over-weight on my luggage every time I came back from abroad.

Although I write erotic fiction, my main reading penchant is for sci-fi and thriller, with a hefty dose of horror thrown in for good measure.

Having a book read, however, is a very different experience to reading it yourself. And, strangely enough, I never understood how much we, as readers, form our own voice in our heads to act as narrator when we're reading fiction. This is short-circuited when a book is read to you. The tone, the emphasis, accents, etc. have a huge effect on the narrative experience.

Having just plowed through a number of F.G. Cottam novels, I stumbled across his blog on goodreads and he has an interesting post on how listening to your own book read can give you insight into its flaws in a way that editing can't.

I write on a mac, and it has a nifty little 'voice' feature that I use almost constantly after I finish a first draft. At first, I set it up with the least offensive voice I could find. It still sounded ridiculously electronic - like Stephen Hawking reading smut - which sent me off into spasms of giggling. But the value of it lies in that, if the prose can shine through that kind of a brutal reading, it's pretty good prose.

I also find that it's excellent for proof-reading. I'm one of those writers who goes almost blind to the prose on the page. I know what I meant and where I'm going with the story, so I have a terrible time spotting typos, repetitions, grammar mistakes, etc. Listening to chunks of the text makes the errors stand out a mile, so I catch them. Most of the time, anyway.

I'm not sure how to do this on a PC, but on a mac, it's easy. Go into System Preferences, Speech, Text-to-Speach, and select the system voice that is least offensive to you. Tick the 'Speak selected text when the key is pressed' and just set up a hot key for it.

Then, when you select a chunk of text with your cursor, you can hit the hot key, and it will read it back to you.

If you can't live with any of the system voices (I found Stephen Hawking very disturbing after a while) , you can purchase better ones, through Cepstral. I bought a voice called 'Lawrence'.

Strangely enough, I have become rather enamoured of Lawrence. I picture him as approximately 55, rather lean, a bit donnish. I'm almost positive he lives in my computer after having been fired from MI5 for gross misconduct with a stock boy.

He's got absolutely no shame, has Lawrence. He'll read almost everything and pronounce it quite reliably. I noticed, however, he has a preference for lesbian sex scenes. He reads them with almost disturbing relish.

A bit creepy, really.