I have just finished a proofread of my second novel, Feather Vane, which comes out in March! But I use technology to read my documents aloud so when I say proofread I really mean I listened to it more slowly.
Feather Vane is a book about the weight of other people’s judgements and the temptation to see changing yourself as the only solution – something I think all teenagers feel. At times I’ve been embarrassed about using text-to-speech software, particularly when I accidentally played it aloud at school because the sped-up robotic voice does sound strange and my classmates would laugh. They weren’t laughing at me, just at the voice speaking a million miles an hour at a time they weren’t expecting it – but I didn’t like anything that made me seem different and I felt those laughs personally. But not anymore! The app I’m using in this photo is VoiceDream and the fastest it can read aloud is 605 words per minute and this is my equivalent of skim-reading. More often than not, sighted people are amazed I can understand what is being said at that speed! According to my research (a quick google search I did one time), the average adult reading speed for fiction is 260 words per minute, so this technology is my equivalent of a magic potion! When it is time for me to proofread my own novels I slow it down to this speed. At first, it feels painfully slow but I soon get used to it and it really does help me to notice mistakes such as missing words, or misspellings which make the robot voice sound garbled as it still valiantly tries to say it. It is not fool proof. I often miss mistakes I’ve made because it sounds right aloud – like ‘draw’ as in sketch and ‘drawer’ as in a slidey cupboard (not the dictionary definition but still)! Thankfully, a wonderful proofreader has worked their own magic on this manuscript with such precision that they noticed everything from additional spaces and an italicised quotation marks, to an em dash being slightly longer than usual. In short, I may not be able to change what or how much I can see, but I can change the way I work. If my technology is my magic potion, then a professional proofreader is my fairy godmother. . . and I can just be me! Feather Vane comes out March 26th 2026 and you can read more about it (and even pre-order it) by clicking the button below!
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