It’s September! SEPTEMBER! What is happening to time?Where has this year gone?

I haven’t caught up with you all in a few weeks, so it’s time for a big ol’ update. What’s Up Wednesday is a weekly post, created by blog friends Jaime and her sister Erin!

What I’m Reading

I went into hardcore reading mode in August, and blitzed through quite a few titles. It was nice to get some solid reading progress.

At the moment I’m reading Bird by Bird (if you’re a writer, READ THIS) and Charm and Strange (slow to start, but I’m half-way through and it’s amazing). I’ve also got The Lives of Tao back from some work colleagues who took a shine to it, and I’m looking forward to finally finding out how Wes Chu’s action-packed spy story ends!

What I’m Writing

I’ve been working on incorporating beta feedback on DIVIDE, and man, I’ve had some absolutely amazing advice from talented writers Rob Haines and Michael F Stewart. If you want to be in the second beta round, shoot me an e-mail (emma@emmamaree.com) and I will use your e-mails as motivation to revise with haste!

I’m also drafting out a few short stories and a super-secret-project for fun.

What Else I’ve Been Up To

I passed my theory test! *bounces* I’m so excited about that. Now I’m getting back to work on practical lessons.

As a reward for passing, Dave got me the excellent card games Star Fluxx and Pirate Fluxx. If you’ve never played Fluxx, it is one of the easiest card games out there to grasp: Draw one card, play one card. And from that one simple rule, things get interesting…

I also got a Chromebook as a portable writing machine. It worked well so far, especially after I got the ‘search’ key functioning as caps lock — I’m a self-taught touch typist, so I’m in the habit of quick-tapping caps lock the same way most people use shift.

(His name is Chronos, because the delivery tracker has him time travelling — I got a notice at 9pm on dispatch day to say he’d apparently been in transit since 9am. But there was a “problem”. That “problem” was them resolved, and he continued his journey that evening at 11pm.)

It’s a light weight machine with a lot of battery power, and plenty of power to handle my writing needs. However, it struggles a bit if I procrastinate and start opening a hundred tabs. This, it turns out, is for the best.

It also boots up from power off in no time at all (six seconds, maybe) and wakes up from sleep in a flash. It’s handy for a pick-up-and-go writing machine, and the constant saving to Google docs mean I can flip the screen down and fall asleep without worrying about finding a power socket or e-mailing myself a backup of the file.

(I still send myself and my Kindle back-ups regularly, though, because it’s unwise to rely entirely on the cloud.)

On a similar tech-geek tangent, have you seen the 2nd generation Kindle Paperwhite? (Old news for US readers, brand new for UK readers.) I’m kind of impressed by that pice tag, and if Kindle Matchbook hits UK shores (a program which sends you a free or reduced-price the e-book version when you buy selected physical book, similar to Angry Robot’s clonefiles initiative) I’ll probably be swayed to get one…

(Alt title: Is Amazon stealing author’s audiobook business?
Alt title 2: OH NO, MY MONEY. D=)

Okay, I’ve had time to think over the whole debate over whether or not book-seller overlord Amazon are breaching the rights of authors by allowing their Kindle e-book reader to read out words in a poor attempt at a human voice.

So, ignoring the much bigger issues of how often authors are ripped off by movie contracts, merch deals and even the actual publishing contracts, here’s my two cents:

It’s progress.

There are multiple advantages in text-to-speech. The most notable and respectable being that it aids the visually impaired, physically disabled, dyslexic or undereducated enjoy a book they couldn’t otherwise. That’s the main point behind it all, and it’s a brilliant one.

But authors, agents and publishers are still up in arms because they think it’ll get in the way of their audiobook sales and get between them and their precious profits.

Riiight. If we’re speaking in far-off-future tense, then I could understand it, but right now, the only reason I’d ask a computer to read my work to me is for the lulz. (Have you heard the Mac system voices? Oh, they’re genius.)

For now, though, they can’t compete with audiobooks, but they can strike a note of fear in their hearts – which is brilliant.

There’s nowhere near enough effort put into audiobooks. My favourite forms of them – read either by the author or by the cast from the TV show or movie adaption, eg “Of Mice and Men” and the Doctor Who new novels – are few and far between, and often inexperienced authors are thrown into a recording studio to read their work in deadpan for a few hours or given some generic narrator to drag us through the adventure. We don’t even get the sound effects radio plays would grace us with, or even any music other than a slight starting jingle if we get lucky.

So I’m all for improving our freaky, artificial attempts at computer voices, because if we do, the audiobooks market will actually have to do new things to survive. Let’s see some effort, shall we?

Love,
E.Maree
xoxo

kindle

I Keep Forgetting to Put Titles on My Blog Posts

What I’m Reading

What I’m Writing

What Else I’ve Been Up To

Oh no, my audiobooks!