As read by my computer wife Karen

[breakinglight11]

Artist's rendering of this process

So yesterday was the day I was finally allowed to return to my completed first draft of my Adonis novel, after taking a two-week break from it in hopes of gaining some measure of objectivity. And, perhaps predictably giving what a disaster human I am, I found myself terrified to look at it, after spending a week chewing my face off wanting to get back to work.

But I marshaled my forces and set myself to read it— just read it, before I attempted any changes. It was a struggle to get going, if only because every time I ran into something I wasn't happy with— which, even within the first chapter or two, happened constantly —I wanted to get up and pace around to work off the nervous energy. This is a frequent discomfort reaction on my part, one that is not very conducive to efficient reading.

Then, by pure accident, I turned on the Read Aloud function of Microsoft Word— the robotic vocabulator or whatever that converts text to speech. I think I vaguely knew this existed, but it never occurred to me to use before, until it started reading at a random place in the second chapter of my book.

For whatever reason, I immediately thought of Karen, artificially intelligent domestic companion to the Spongebob villain Plankton, hilariously referred to as his "computer wife." I was never a huge Spongebob fan, but I always loved that joke, because to my recollection they provided no explanation for Karen's existence, and I enjoyed the lowkey implication that no actual living person could stand being married to Plankton. Also, come on— the phrase "computer wife"? COMEDY GOLD.

This tickled me enough to get me over some of my anxiety. If "Karen" read it to me, I wouldn't have to sit still and focus. I could flail and roll around and pace as much as I wanted without losing my place. "Okay, computer wife," I said, putting my headphones in. "Let's do this." So I took a long walk around my neighborhood, under an umbrella to ward off the rain, with no distractions from the words of my book.

Friends, "Karen" is not a good reader. She murders rhythm. She pauses for about five minutes every time she hits a comma. She has baffling blindspots when it comes to pronunciations of certain relatively mundane words, such as "lunging" and "bruise." I am infuriated by her inability to recognize the word "legion" when she has no trouble with "legionnaire." But she reads clearly and accurately, exactly as it occurs on the page. And her flat, matter-of-fact, reducto-ad-absurdium diction makes me focus on the words, with none of the distraction that good actors often bring when their skill elevates bad material.

And I found I could separate a little bit of my emotional closeness to the text when I could "blame" her, however ridiculously, for the parts when it sounded bad. "You're KILLING ME, Karen!" I moaned, every time she came to a part where I never settled for saying something one way when I could say it three or four. Or "WHAT IS THIS SHIT, KAREN?" when she plowed her way through mangled, awkward phrasing. I kind of feel like I was more able to objectively evaluate what sections were working and what weren't, because I felt weirdly less responsible for the failures when she was presenting the words to me. Crazy, but I'll take it!

It's... not a perfect system. Hearing the sex scenes like that is an endurance exercise; my computer wife has no facility for dirty talk. I feel like even awesome ones weren't going to outshine delivery that stilted. And there's no way to gauge the rhythm or flow of the verbiage, as she basically can convey none. But I found that if I was able to enjoy and feel engaged by a scene even through her droning monotone, I must have done a pretty good job with it. And if my prose wasn't working, well, Karen sure as hell wasn't going to dress it up.

I have listened to it twice through in this manner, to make sure my impressions weren't a fluke. I feel pretty confident in my overall assessment that the piece is at once both much better and much worse than I feared, depending on the spot. I note that when it comes to "action" scenes, as in, scene where things are happening, such as characters taking actions or pursuing their goals with tactics, the book is much, much stronger. That totally makes sense, given my background as a dramatist and my overall storytelling philosophy to think of narrative as a series of actions that people take according to their goals, their character, and their circumstances. When it comes to moments of "internality," where a character is examining a state of affairs internally, or when I need to describe something that's not a HAPPENING, it gets much, much weaker. I wasn't kidding when I mentioned not settling for saying something one way when I could hammer it home a few more different ways on top of that.

And the over-explaining. I mean, I seriously have the sentence "What seemed a mere inevitability became a sword of Damocles for which he could never stop waiting to fall."

...

Really, Roberts? You need to clarify "for which he could never stop waiting to fall"? THAT'S WHAT SWORDS OF DAMOCLES ARE, GENIUS. THAT IS LITERALLY ALL THEY MEAN. THAT IS THE ENTIRE IDIOM. You might as well have written "became a sword of Damocles that acted like a sword of Damocles."

Ugh. Who wrote this shit? KAREN I BLAME YOU.

Anyway. I feel like this is a decent starting point. It is going to take a lot, a lot, A LOT of work to whip those lousy, overwritten sections into shape. But I was worried I was not going to be able to make any like an accurate, objective assessment of my work, and I really think this helped with that.

Thanks for the help, computer wife! Now learn how to fucking pronounce "protege."