Musings & Thoughts for Thursday, December 21, 2023, or: ‘Alexa, Read to Me From This Book…” & Quick Life Update from Madison

Late Morning, Thursday, December 21, 2023, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, there, folks. It’s a frosty early winter day here in my corner of New England. Presently, the temperature in Madison is 25°F/-4°C under sunny conditions. The forecast for the Conway/Madison area calls for sunny skies and a high of 34°F/1°C. As we are in a “drying out” trend after the passing of a nasty rainstorm that passed through the region a few days ago, no precipitation (including snow) is expected to fall here over the next few days, although this is likely to change on Wednesday, December 27.

(So, for those who have asked if I’m going to have a “white Christmas” this year, the answer seems to be, “No, not this year.” And considering how hard it is for me to adapt to the cold weather, I say that with relief and gratitude.)

Musings, Thoughts, and Observations

Well, here we are, on December 21 – the Winter Solstice – and (since it’s late morning here in Madison) less than three days away from Christmas Eve 2023. If you remember your basic science classes from elementary school, you’ll know that today is not just the first day of traditional (or astronomical) winter, but it’s also the shortest day of the year as far as daylight hours go.

Per my trusty PC’s Weather app, the sunset here will be at 4:09 PM Eastern Standard Time.  At my former home in the Tampa Bay area, the sun will set at 5:39 PM. I’ve been up north twice before – in New York City back in the late 1980s – but in March, and even the Big Apple is to the south of us. So, until I moved here last week, I’d not experienced this phenomenon of sunsets before 5 PM. And, as much as I dislike the cold, I dislike this facet of life in the northern latitudes the most – at least I can counteract the effects of the cold by dressing in layers and using space heaters when necessary. I suppose I’ll eventually get used to it, but I do get moody when the last light of the day fades and night falls.

The New Tablet: “Alexa, Read Me This Book”

So…yesterday I opened the box with my first Amazon delivery to New Hampshire: it contained two items – the December 8 revised edition of Reunion: A Story (which, alas, still has minor editing issues) and my new Fire HD 10 tablet – the replacement to the Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet I lost, more than likely between Westfall, NY and here. I had a bit of trouble with setting it up; I forgot the password to the Wi-Fi router here, so I had to ask the guy I share the house with, Stuart, for it again. (He’d written it down and gave it to me last Friday, but I misplaced that scrap of paper and neglected to jot it down in my PC’s Notes app.)

I haven’t messed with the tablet much since I finally got it to connect once I was able to connect it to the Internet. It has Alexa, which the 2015 Fire HD 8 does not, so I experimented with asking “her” to open, run, and close some of the various apps, including the Kindle functionality that I most used the missing Fire 8 for.

I also discovered that if I ask Alexa to read a book that does not have the Audible enhancement (sold separately by Amazon), including my own Reunion: A Story, she will do so. Now, most Kindle versions come with a text-to-audio function, including the Kindle for PC edition you can download for a home computer, but the one on my misplaced Fire HD 8 sounded robotic and unappealing, so I rarely used it on there. The text-to-audio version on the PC version of Kindle is fine, even though the narrator is female and (as far as I know) can’t be changed. But as much as I enjoy – and depend on – my PC, I like the portability of tablets, at least in situations where I don’t have a TV and Blu-ray player combo set up or I’m away from home.

Anyway, once I made sure that my tablet was linked to my Amazon account and that my Kindle library was “present and accounted for,” I asked Alexa to read the then-current edition of Reunion. I just wanted to make sure that the text-to-audio feature on the newer tablet – the lost one was from 2015 and had that gratingly artificial-sounding voice, you know? -worked.

Well, Alexa’s voice is pleasant and feminine, and she does read rather well, although Amazon needs to tweak the AI so that when it reads calendar dates – like 2023, say – it doesn’t say “two thousand, twenty-three.”

The Blooper in Reunion

So…everything went rather well with Alexa’s reading of my novella until she reached a point in the chapter titled A Call from Miami. Namely, this point, which on the paperback edition of Reunion appears on page 4:

Every night before I reluctantly leave my office I check my computer for e-mail messages. I get them all the time from all over the world. But on that Tuesday night, there was only one message.

To: Professor James K. Garraty 
From: Mark 
Wednesday, 11 February 1998, 1634 EST
Subject: m.e.r.

Jim,
Be home by 10 PM. Got to tell you something.
Mark 

That’s it. There were no details, none of Mark’s acerbic observations, no jokes. Just a cryptic subject line and that terse message. 

Be home by 10 PM. Got to tell you something.

Oops.

(See, beginning writers, this is why we need either a Beta Reader or a trusted and skilled editor when we write anything that we want to publish. That Tuesday thing has been on the Word file I created in 1998 and no one, not even me, has caught that blooper. That is, until I asked Alexa to read my story aloud.)

Ugh.

Of course, I asked Alexa to stop reading the novella, turned off the tablet, and returned to my desk to fix the mistake. Happily, having Kindle Create on my PC makes editing and revising relatively easy, and it only took me a few minutes to change “Tuesday” to “Wednesday” and upload the revision to Kindle Direct Publishing.

The “fix” went live on the Kindle edition at 4:01 PM yesterday, although it usually takes between 24-72 hours for updates to show up in the e-book edition.

The paperback’s update is also live as of 3:58 AM today. Again, if you want to repurchase the hardcopy edition with the corrected text, wait a week or so before ordering. (If you have neat handwriting and don’t want to get another copy, I provided the editing point, so use a pen and scribble “Wednesday” over where it now says “Tuesday” on page 4.)

“To write is human, to edit is divine.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Hey, at least I’m a conscientious self-published author; I’ve bought and read, much to my disgust, a few “masterpieces” by independently published “writers” who wouldn’t have fit in well at my community college’s student newspaper back in the 1980s. Some people with more ambition than talent seem to rush through a rough draft of a “novel,” don’t bother with beta readers or editors, and don’t do rewrites or revisions. As a result, there’s a lot of piss-poor stuff available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other venues where self-published books can be offered for sale.

I am not as good a writer as, say, Stephen King or the late Tom Clancy, but I did take a course in creative writing (in the 1986-87 academic year, I believe) when I was in college. I also majored in journalism/mass communications, so I have training and some experience at this writing gig.

And since it’s my name on the cover and title page, it behooves me to make fucking sure that my work is presented in the best way possible.

So, yeah…that “Tuesday” thing had to go, as did the countless typos and inconsistencies that plagued Reunion before 2023.

The other item in the box with my tablet…the paperback edition of Reunion with the December 8 fix but not, obviously, with yesterday’s.  I have atrocious handwriting, so I’ll order a new paperback just…because. I can always give the copy I have to someone else if they ask me, “So, what do you do for a living?”

Oh, and on a related note: Even though Amazon predicted that the protective case for the new Fire 10 HD would arrive yesterday, UPS also delivered it (in a separate package) on Tuesday night.

Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my Thursday; my mind is still not calm enough to work on Reunion: Coda, so I can’t promise that I’ll try messing with the manuscript. Of course, if I feel that I can, I will. I want to publish my novel by spring, and I think that if I put in the necessary elbow grease, I might be able to reach that goal.  We’ll see what happens, okay?