Text to speech to porn

[resonant]

My chapter of RWA isn't terribly helpful as a critique group. If there are twelve people at a meeting:

1. 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")
   
   
   
   1. 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?!"
      
   2. 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."
      
   
   
2. five of them are too nice to utter any criticism at all
   
3. 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.

Comments

[kass]

Ahahaha! That is awesome.

And I must say, I think the fact that your life is trending toward increased oddity is a sign that you're Doing It Right. :-)

[resonant]

Well, I admit I would hate it if I felt my life was getting less odd.

[lightgetsin]

Uh, yeah, try writing that way.

...I dream in TTS, sometimes.

[resonant]

I suppose you have to train yourself not to be unduly influenced by the character cues that each voice gives you? Because I definitely am feeling that I know Lucy, and that she does not fully approve of the kind of language I use.

[lightgetsin]

Sort of? I'm pretty sure at this point I've stripped all meaning out of the standard voices I use for various devices. They are just . . . a medium, the way print is a medium, I suppose.

Though I do have different tonalities set for various text attributes, and my squeaky italics voice is what I use to emphasize thoughts in my own head.

[resonant]

I'm loving the idea of a squeaky italics voice!

[ecaterin]

...I dream in TTS, sometimes.


OMG, that sounds odd!

LOLOL at 'squeaky italics voice!' I often find myself wondering what my LJ posts sound like in your TTS rendering. From a visual perspective, my online style is pretty overwrought. After years on line, I've developed an online voice that conveys LOTS OF EMOTION, to avoid any lack of tonal clarity. Of course this means italics, ALL CAPS, emoticons and other forms of emphasis litter my typing - so either your TTS has great fun reading out emphatic bits like, 'star' whatever blah 'star', or you've got a library of aural cues you've worked up for every possible online type convention.

I like wondering about these things. I can't get to know you beyond what text can convey, and my brain ponders this stuff in between times :D

[lightgetsin]

'star' whatever blah 'star', or you've got a library of aural cues you've worked up for every possible online type convention.


A little of both. I can program in almost any behavior I want, but i actually screen out some things just to keep the figurative noise down. So I have alt voices for italics, bold, underline, strikethrough (he sounds kinda growly and grumpy), tiny and big fonts, etc. But things like "*emphasis*" are still read as "star emphasis star." Probably because that's how they read to me fifteen years ago, before I could reprogram the behavior, so my brain just interprets that correctly now without any intervening steps.

[ecaterin]

Oh my, now I will always hear 'growly and grumpy' when I set up strikethrough text :D Suggestible, ain't I?

And, as always, the adaptability of the human brain to transform whatever we take in through our senses and make sense out of it, amazes me :)

[sage]

Hee, yes. I've relied on TTS for reading and editing for years now, and there's nothing like a computerized voice to tell you how many times a writer can use "Yes, yes, yes, ooh, like that" before it gets ridiculous. Personally, I find describing the response without writing the specific noises out works much, much better. It's also a huge help for catching momentum breaks.

I'm sorry to hear your workshop group isn't more useful.

[resonant]

Well, they're not much use as a workshop group, but they're all sorts of fun as conversationalists. Plus one of our published writers will sometimes bring in a tantric sex scene to workshop, which is always amusing, especially when you have to do it over pancakes at one of the back tables at Denny's.

[florahart]

Ahahahahaha! Where "odder" means "better"...right?

[resonant]

But of course!

[sef1029]

Ha! You've inspired me to try out the text-to-speech function for fanfic on my new Kindle.

[resonant]

GhostReader is a million miles better than the built-in tts on my Mac, but it still has trouble with proper nouns, of course. And it doesn't understand emphasis no matter how you indicate it, which leads to this annoying thing in which a character is quoted as saying, "Yes, asterisk yes! asterisk."

[delphi]

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?!"

*dies laughing*

And all I'll say is that I've yet to find a TTS program that can properly pronounce the name "Alastor."

[resonant]

When the Tech Goddess's sons were teenagers, they spent many happy afternoons trying to get the Mac's TTS program to pronounce various rude words correctly. "Booger" was a particular challenge.

[wrabbit]

XD

What are you working on?

[resonant]

Inception schmorn. I didn't mean to! I swear it was just a moment of weakness!

[anatsuno]

AND THE CROWD REJOICES!

At least, this one does. Enough for a whole crowd. :D

[tevere]

I'm part of the rejoicing crowd, too!

[resonant]

I'm so embarrassed, though! I fell so hard for Sherlock, and now here I am, after only three stories -- it's like I went on honeymoon and ran off with the busboy.

(I'm sure my Sherlock obsession will be amply renewed when the new season starts.)

[tevere]

Ooh, I finally just watched the first episode of Sherlock last night and loved it. Do you link all your Sherlock stories to your DW, or are some extras hiding solely in the flashfic comm?

[resonant]

No, I did one flashfic, but it's been linked here. Or they're all on Ao3 except for Foul Bachelor Detectives.

[tevere]

\o/

[samjohnsson]

It's okay, Inception's run off with many a bride.

[resonant]

Bwah! It's like the succubus of fandoms.

[ecaterin]

Woo hooooo! I still haven't seen the movie, but helenish's Inception pr0n has really got me into the characters!

[resonant]

Yes, it's Helen's fault that I even got interested in the characters in the first place, curse her.

[ecaterin]

LOLOLOL!!!! I managed to stay away from the Inception medieval pr0n.....but I don't imagine I'll stay away from it for long. I can't help reading just about anything you, Helen, Sam or Lightgetsin put out any more. Bad writers! Sucking in innocent bystanders! :D

[garryowen]

I found this entry hilarious. I always read my own work aloud to test for awkwardness and cadence, but just because I'm so entertained by the thought of Lucy, I'm going to try her out!

Writing groups are funny. I had an informal one a few years ago, and I brought in a gay musical I was writing. The group's response: It's too raunchy.

*boggles*

[resonant]

Of the four, Lucy is the one whose voice seems least overeducated and BBC-ish. Rachel in particular seems quite stuffy to me.

I suppose in the minds of some people, "contains characters identified as gay" is practically the same thing as "involves explicit gay sex."

On the other hand, the spouse had a creative writing class (wow, could this have been in high school? I can't think when else he would have taken such a thing) in which some of the students did bring in their own personal porn. Thus sharing details about their inner lives that he would have been much happier not knowing about.

[goseaward]

That is a brilliant idea, and I might have to steal it :D

[resonant]

It had occurred to me in the past, but I had assumed that the text to speech standards were still as low as they used to be -- the voices that sound like they're both robots and Eastern European at the same time.

The speech is not completely natural, but it's much, much better than I remember it being.

[krait]

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."

YES YES THIS. So much this! So STOP SHELVING IT WITH MY FANTASY, pleezkaythanx. I am shopping for elves and archaic weaponry and PLOT, not sexytimes in shining armour!

[resonant]

And with no discernible rules to the world-building!

[delurker]

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?!"
ahahaha! That's awesome.

[resonant]

I once brought in a story segment with the phrase "the elf behind the pushcart," and the whole thing broke down while someone demanded an explanation, not of the elf, but of what a pushcart was!

[othercat]

...I think I'd be a twitching mess if I were surrounded by people so unfamiliar with fantasy that even the basic tropes, themes and species are foreign territory to them.

[resonant]

There's one particular woman in the group who is so utterly baffled by fantasy vocabulary that it's almost weird to talk to her -- like, one writer brought in a story in which a character was celebrating his Naming Day, since of course you can't assume that nonhuman cultures will celebrate birthdays, and this just baffled her.

[othercat]

Certain members of my family are like that. For instance, my grandmother took a flying leap off the handle because I wanted to watch Alien Nation while we were living at her house. A show she did not like because it had men getting pregnant, which men do not do. Trying to explain that the character was NOT HUMAN was practically impossible.

[china_shop]

Hee! That is awesome!

[samjohnsson]

Pure win, that.

[templemarker]

I admit I'm more apt to read my story back to myself if I'm concerned about a paragraph. I've never had anyone read it back to me though; at least, not in the drafting process. I think I'd find that very awkward.

I don't know if you've had any podfic done of your work, but as someone who's done a fair amount of podfic of other people's work I'm genuinely surprised at how odd I feel about someone doing the same thing for a story of mine. The two times it's happened I've had this terrible moment of cognitive dissonance thirty seconds in and have turned them off. But that's on completed works, too, as opposed to drafting.

[resonant]

I've never recorded podfic, but I too am unable to listen to it when it's my own work. Just strange, like seing your own body walking around without you.