We’ve just finished recording the audio book for Shades of Milk and Honey. We’ll send it off to Macmillan to see if they want any changes and hope that there won’t be many.
It was a fascinating experience in part because I realized that I want to change my revising process. Normally as part of my process, I read the story aloud and I did that with Shades of Milk and Honey. The thing that differed with the audio book is that we were starting and stopping a lot more, to correct stumbles or noises. Because of that, I never sank into the story and felt like I was performing for an audience. It made me much more aware of the words.
Understand that the mistakes I saw aren’t actually mistakes. They are places where words that are fine on the page are awful in the mouth. Like “She turned off the road and rode between…” Those homophones are icky.
So when I revise Glamour in Glass, I’ll read it aloud but I’ll break the reading up artificially so that I continue to pay attention to what’s on the page.
The other thing that was really fascinating was doing the British accent for an entire book. Periodically Rob would play something back and I’d just catch a snippet like “…with a single word…” Now, really the only major pronunciation difference is in “word” which has the soft R favored by the British. I’d hear it and it would sound AWFUL but my dialect coach would say, “No, that’s right.”
I finally realized, that the reason it sounded wrong to me is that it sounded like the way I said things as a kid with a speech impediment. NOT that I’m saying all Brits sound like they have speech impediments, but that soft R is very, very close to the way I sounded when I couldn’t say the letter at all. So what I was reacting to wasn’t about getting the accent wrong, it was about triggering decades old training about the importance of using a hard R.
As I said, that was a fascinating little trick my brain was playing on me.
All in all, I’m happy to be out of the recording booth and feel pretty good about the work we did.
Congratulations on finishing it! I notice that my son, who has issues with the R sound, sounds occasionally British with Rs near the end of words.
Thank you! Yes, to the American ear, I think it often sounds like the R just isn’t there at all which is the way my speech impediment manifested itself as a child.