A necessary part of my DIY speech therapy is listening to my recordings to evaluate the successes and needs-work of my smooth jazz DJ voice. When I’m reading something that causes me to have outbursts, those interjections revert to my default offended-crow squawk. Between the switch-flipping and the commentary, it’s hard to keep a straight […]
KDP publishers can now one-click “AI” “translate” their books into other languages. (In beta for now.) Do you know how many shitty “translations” have already been done on the cheap by “translators” running text through Google Translate? Hey, at least now when readers mercilessly ridicule you because the “translation” of your book is nonsense, you
A book was recommended to me. The premise was fun, but the author exhibited a writing tic that had me screaming and casting the book aside by Chapter 4. The prose was littered with somehow, somewhere, sometime, someone, and something. Someone tidied my study while I was at the museum. Is it really a mystery
In response to a challenge to engage with readers as a reader, this is a chronicle of my recent reading, which should swiftly demonstrate why talking about what I’m reading won’t actually make me any friends. I am constitutionally incapable of lying about how much I love everything I read. Some of the things I
I was searching my mother’s bookshelves for a particular ancient paperback. Her books are mostly romance or romance-adjacent, so the cover reveals led to reminiscing about the eras of fabulous painted covers and boring floral covers that didn’t even give us fabulous painted stepbacks. One anomaly, however, prompted a very different reaction. Obviously, there was
TL; DR: Amazon just expanded the pipeline dumping bot-voice audiobooks into Audible. Let me start by saying I have ethical objections to bot-voice audiobooks. A) Labor solidarity with actors, musicians, visual artists, and everybody else ripped off and told they’re obsolete because now Johnny NoSkills can push a button and “do” their job. B) Where
I want to thank the person who recommended Building Great Sentences: How to write the kind of sentences you love to read by Brooks Landon, not because I have much positive to say about it but because now I know who to blame for a lot of copy editors’ bald spots where they’ve ripped out
Content Warning Discourse is in the air again, which means people are showing their whole asses again, now with links to news outlets breathlessly and uncritically regurgitating anti-content-warning opinions because journalism is dead. I’ve already blown my stack about media literacy elsewhere at length, so I’ll drop the short, semi-polite version of that here, along
I’m seeing this often enough that it’s clearly not made in error: (Sorry, the images went bye-bye. The alt text remains, however, being useful for everybody.) These aren’t textbooks! These aren’t audiobooks! These aren’t box sets containing multiple books! These are two unrelated publishers who want more than $20 for individual digital novels! The trade
I recently read a book in which there are not one but two places in which one character is asked to explain something and the text, in the story, is essentially “and so I told them,” never providing the reader with the actual explanation. My kneejerk reaction to the first occurrence was, yes, it sure