Over and Over ...

In Willam Goldman's novel Boys and Girls Together, there's a writer named Adam who has to decide which he should write first: the great American novel, or a potboiler that will make him rich. He decides to do the potboiler first, and there's a mighty painful scene where his publisher's agent tells him he absolutely won't publish the book.

Maybe Adam was lucky. I'm currently recording my novel as an audio book. I did not see this coming, but the main effect of this effort is that I have to read it, and hear it, over and over. I read each page three times before recoding it, and I may record some scenes many times to get them right. After listening to, and editing, every sentence, I listen to the final cut. When the final cut is okay, I submit it to PodioBooks. They modify my tracks a little, adding an intro and an outro. I have to listen to their modified version to make sure it hasn't been munged. Their copying process is excellent, but in fact they have had to apply it to my chapters three times, which means I get to hear each chapter three more times.

I can't imagine how awful I'd feel by now if I didn't actually enjoy listening to what I wrote. No potboilers for me!