Tag: audio

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The Layover Formula: Taking My Own Proofreading Advice

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.

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The Radio Show Reviews That Never Happened

At the beginning of the year, I briefly considered devoting the last entry of each month to a review of a different programme from BBC Sounds. I listen to a lot of their audio comedy and drama, so it seemed like a workable idea at the time.

I abandoned the plan soon after, however, and there are a few reasons behind that decision. The saved draft from 19 January 2026 included a list of the shows I thought I might cover. Here they are in the order they were written down:

The list also illustrates the first problem with the idea: whatever I reviewed would need to be available at the time. Like most streaming platforms, BBC Sounds removes programmes after a set period.

The entries with links were still active at the time of writing this entry, so if I’d decided in January that the topic for May would be Clare in the Community, readers wouldn’t be able to listen for themselves.

Which brings me to the second factor behind the abandonment: how much time I have available to review them.

When I listened to each of these programmes for the first time, it was on an informal basis where I wasn’t necessarily taking in every word but gaining a general sense of the plot. By contrast, an effective review needs active listening, for which I would need to go back and take notes. Fukushima, for instance, contains more than three hours of script, time I doubt I would be able to spare.

When I was studying for my M.Litt Writing Practice & Study degree, I was roped into writing three book reviews for the university magazine. I say three, but for one of these, I’d written the review before the tutor told me she’d only lent me the book for interest; it was still accepted for publication, so my effort wasn’t wasted. It was rewarding to see the finished product, but there was so much input for an article that took five minutes to read.

My third and final reason is the most detailed one.

Let me take you back to a banner advert I used to encounter on the Internet in the 1990s. The headline was Tired of seeing movies based on one guy’s opinion? I’ve long forgotten the name of the service, but it would have been an early aggregator for audience reviews.

At the time, I thought this was a fantastic idea. If I was unsure about Titanic or The Matrix, then instead of relying on the film review in the paper, I could see what others thought before buying a ticket.

But with the crowd-as-reviewer model now the more dominant one, I can see the flaw in hindsight. That one guy, as they put it, generally understood structure, nuance and how to convey this to readers. He was worth a dozen armchair critics who instead based their reviews on the attractiveness of Kate Winslet or had a bee in their bonnet about the science of the titular Matrix.

As such, I asked myself whether we really need any more reviews, albeit in a more niche art-form than cinema. Taken with the other two reasons, my answer – at least for the moment – is in the negative.

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The Charm of Audio Drama

While almost every radio station can be accessed online these days, one of my favourite purchases from the last five years is a pocket DAB+ radio. I find it freeing to use a standalone device with few distractions that doesn’t use much battery.

That first radio was made by Pure, but it stopped charging some time ago. A local repair shop was physically unable to remove the cover, while the manufacturer declined to make an out-of-warranty repair. As such, I bought a refurbished one made by Majority. I hadn’t heard of this brand before, but it’s just as good as any other I’ve used.

I typically listen to BBC stations, particularly Radio 1, even though I’m more than a decade older than their target demographic. The attraction is that most contemporary music is upbeat, and I’ve found it increasingly difficult to listen to slow music over the last few years.

But I don’t want to focus on music output in this entry. I’m here to talk about speech. The corporation is a leading producer and broadcaster of scripted audio drama. Most of its output can be found on BBC Radio 4 Extra, sandwiched between comedy and occasionally poetry.

One drama I caught recently was Credit Risk by R D Wingfield, a name that might be familiar to fans of A Touch of Frost. I didn’t specifically tune in for this, but I was intrigued by how a gang infiltrated the offices of a credit card company to siphon off payments. I also didn’t specifically tune in for Double Income No Kids Yet, featuring David Tennant as half of the only childless couple in a friend group, but I’ve so far listened to two episodes.

Such audio drama tends to have a high repeatability potential. The Tennant drama has aged reasonably well since its original run from 2001 to 2003. Credit Risk, by contrast, is somewhat fossilised in 1977, but it’s a fascinating historical snapshot of when many card payments were done manually, and by characters called ‘Mr Shadbolt’ and ‘Sales Lady’.

I haven’t even mentioned long-running soap The Archers, although I don’t listen to that.

For those who have only watched TV dramas, there are some immediate differences in how the dialogue sounds. On the screen, writers aim for a more naturalistic style, since the setting can be made obvious through vision. In audio drama, the scene needs to be set with words, tone and/or sound effects.

On account of this restriction, the dialogue can sound somewhat clunky, even though the production team will aim to reduce the word count as much as possible.

Although there are plenty of podcasts featuring audio drama, there isn’t a commercial UK station with comparable output. Any speech stations tend to focus on news, current affairs, debate and/or sport.

I wonder whether there’s a gap in the market to add regularly scheduled audio drama. Such programmes are typically made on a shoestring budget, and I don’t foresee much trouble finding a sponsor to offset at least part of the cost.

In the meantime, however, it looks like the BBC has a practical monopoly on broadcast scripted drama.