For those keeping track, I’ve received no further badges from WordPress at present. I’ll issue updates on that story as I receive them.
Meanwhile, I’m still very much on the writing kick from the start of this month. I’ve previously made allusions that what I’m writing is part of a fantasy series published under a pseudonym on a reasonably well-known platform.
I’ve now churned out two new chapters. The first part totalled around 3,700 words, which is already nearly twice as long as some of the previous chapters. Every story has to be approved by an administrator, and the longer it is, the longer the approval process tends to take.
That first part also ended on a major cliffhanger that will steer the rest of the story. As such, I want to make sure the second part resolves all the action in the first. The second part ends with a resolution rather than another cliffhanger.
I’ve built up both parts in a non-linear fashion, then joined the dots to make a complete narrative. I didn’t consciously choose to work this way; that’s just how it panned out. I’ve been tinkering with the story so long now that I’m down to only minor changes on each reading.
On Thursday of last week, I decided it was time to listen to my own advice: leave it aside and come back to it later. To determine the minimum period that a piece should be left aside, I use a self-devised formula: either (a) one minute per word, or (b) 24 hours, whichever is longer. I’ve dubbed it The Layover Formula.
So a 600-word short story would be ten hours, which is rounded up to 24 hours. By contrast, my next chapter currently stands in the region of 6,600 words, or a layover of approximately 4½ days. In a happy coincidence discovered while writing this, 10,000 words leaves a gap of almost exactly a week:
| Word Count | Minutes | Layover |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 100 | 24 hours |
| 500 | 500 | 24 hours |
| 1,000 | 1,000 | 24 hours |
| 2,000 | 2,000 | 1.4 days |
| 5,000 | 5,000 | 3.5 days |
| 10,000 | 10,000 | 7 days |
I last looked at the file late on Thursday night and I told myself not to open it again until tonight. I was permitted, however, to carry out some adjacent activities:
- Jot down relevant notes in another document so I don’t forget them.
- Work on the history, background and lore of the stories.
- Start preparing and writing the next chapter.
I’ve been so distracted by all the adjacent work that it’s actually been rather easy to avoid looking at the document. But when I am working on it, one way I like to proofread is by using text-to-speech synthesis because it won’t skip over most spelling or grammar errors.
Microsoft Word can do this, where it’s called Read Aloud, and the voice is reasonably realistic, albeit with the occasional incorrect tone or word stress. The mobile app also has this feature, although I found it kept stopping around two minutes after the screen was locked.
Faced with this problem, I thought it might be prudent to create an audio file instead that could be heard while walking.
Text-to-MP3 converter tools are a dime a dozen, but many of them offer a trial limit of around 1,000 characters before a subscription is required. I found a PDF to MP3 tool that was free of charge and suitable enough for my purposes, even if it handled page breaks with a long gap.
Once the proofreading was done, the piece will be ready to submit and I can give the audience the resolution they crave. I can’t control how long the approval might take, but I can decide how long to wait before submitting it.
Gavin Cameron 