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Text to speech to porn
Jul. 9th, 2011 11:12 amMy chapter of RWA isn't terribly helpful as a critique group. If there are twelve people at a meeting:
five of them are too nice to utter any criticism at all
our two published writers want to find out exactly what market category you picture your work going into, and then give you detailed step-by-step instructions on how you can precisely tailor your characters, conflicts, and word count to get you into some line of category romances.
So most of the time I don't bother to bring pages, but one thing that is useful is to hear your work read out loud by another person. Boy, that really draws your attention to, say, a sentence that has three words in it that end in -ly.
So I went looking for an application that would read selections out loud to me. And since I seem to be working with British characters at the moment, I went looking for applications with British voices, since the difference between "garridge" and "ga-rahge" could hypothetically throw off the whole rhythm of the sentence, right?
So I downloaded a free trial of GhostReader and then downloaded Graham, Peter, Lucy, and Rachel to read me my work in a fairly decent machine-voiced British.
And now I'm sitting in a coffee shop with headphones on, listening to Lucy, who seems quite a well-meaning sort, say, "Oh, fuck, that is so -- fuck --" in a dispassionate voice.
My life gets odder every year.
- five of them know a lot less about good writing than I do (a lot less; I should tell y'all about the great debate our e-mail loop had on the concept of "show, don't tell")
- three of those are also completely unfamiliar with fantasy, to the point where they say things like, "When you say 'elves,' you're speaking literally?!"
- and the other two don't see the difference between fantasy and paranormal romance. Which is a distinction that I don't feel equal to explaining in nice words, since as a fantasy lover I think of paranormal romance as "that shit that looks like fantasy but isn't."
- three of those are also completely unfamiliar with fantasy, to the point where they say things like, "When you say 'elves,' you're speaking literally?!"
So most of the time I don't bother to bring pages, but one thing that is useful is to hear your work read out loud by another person. Boy, that really draws your attention to, say, a sentence that has three words in it that end in -ly.
So I went looking for an application that would read selections out loud to me. And since I seem to be working with British characters at the moment, I went looking for applications with British voices, since the difference between "garridge" and "ga-rahge" could hypothetically throw off the whole rhythm of the sentence, right?
So I downloaded a free trial of GhostReader and then downloaded Graham, Peter, Lucy, and Rachel to read me my work in a fairly decent machine-voiced British.
And now I'm sitting in a coffee shop with headphones on, listening to Lucy, who seems quite a well-meaning sort, say, "Oh, fuck, that is so -- fuck --" in a dispassionate voice.
My life gets odder every year.