But reading aloud is slow. 5,000 - 6,000 words per hour. And I feel like a real idiot reading aloud to myself. Plus my voice gives out fairly quickly. I doubt I could do more than an hour per day. So I often avoid this step in short fiction, and I've never once taken it with a novel. Calamity of So Long a Life, for example, is about 130,000 words right now. That's as much as twenty-six hours of reading. That's a freaking month of effort at an hour per day.
Except I know that the reward will be a cleaner, smoother, more elegant manuscript, improved in the precise ways that are important to me.
So here we have a behavior that I'm capable of, that will improve a critical process and work product on which I place a very high value, but which I find very frustrating and tedious to actually execute.
By not finding the time to read aloud late draft manuscripts, I'm not doing the very best job I can.
And when I really think about it, this feels like a major failing in me as a writer.
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