Missed by That Much

I Get Smart and Read Myself the Riot Act

Tags epub, Atticus, InDesign, Audible, AI, machine learning


The fit to print date for the Weight of Space is not going to be in late spring. An early summer release date also went by the wayside. Serves my right. I create too many other deadlines that get in the way. My bad.

Yippie.
I did get through the line-by-line copy edit of the WOS by being a bit creative.

Know Thy Limitations

As I shared previously, one of my known editor limitations is I can miss those little words in sentences that can make all the difference to our meanings. It’s not what I see. It’s what I do not see. My well-trained reader brain fills in too many missing blanks. The final spell and typo check of the body of a 350-page book was something I was not looking forward to.

My solution might help someone else so I thought I might share it here.

I choose to employ the well-known and functional Atticus app to do the bulk of the copy formatting. I could have done it in Adobe InDesign but that seemed to be overkill for a words only novel formatting job. To each his own.

Atticus allowed me to quickly produce an acceptable epub format of the book.

Read to Me, Baby

Then I employed the basic Windows narrate to me tools to read the epub version back to me. True. I did have to listen to those horrible Microsoft voices.

The read it to me technique forced me to slow down, focus, and pay attention as the task required. Every day I banged out a set number of pages until the damn thing was done.

Yeah. The new AI apps may make the narrate it back to me game easier in the near future. Elsewhere I live in a world with a larger level of machine learning tech than a lot of folks. I’m neither freaked out or overly impressed with the current state of AI in spite of all the current hype.

How we all learn to train the human autopilot has always been really interesting to me. Got me far too deep into cognitive neuroscience.

Since I have a large public speaking voice that I am told can cut through concrete block walls. I am not all that excited about training an AI voice to mimic mine for an Audible production of this book. Just sayin’.

Real soon now we may have new books read to us by the voices of the dead.

Now that's disturbing.