The draft of Synthesis is almost done. Five more scenes, including the denouement, and the manuscript enters the editing phase.

Since I do some heavy editing already because of the nature of my writing process (utilising speech recognition), the draft is relatively clean already and shouldn’t be too much work, but it will still take somewhere between four and six weeks to get it in shape. Right now, the story is 105,013 words long, so I’ll end up at a little over 110k, which should put me at roughly 100k after edits, if my expectations are correct.

Once Synthesis is finished, I will immediately unpublish Pendulum and work on building a proper Scrivener project for it, so I can work on it and prepare it for the re-release in episodes here on this blog. I also thought about recording myself, narrating the story and creating a YouTube video playlist for it. I’m still torn. I’m a German, I have an accent, I don’t like my voice, but I believe I can record it in a way that gets the job done. That’s, of course, not enough. While I have a pretty good microphone, so the audio quality will be okay, I’m not a narrator. The last time I read a book out loud was when my kids were little, two decades ago, and it was in German. The deciding factor is probably the fact that I feel silly doing this with my wife in the room, though 😉

I did a snippet, the opening sentences of Synthesis, just to see how it goes, and promptly stumbled over a sentence, which reminded me that my prose is not originally made for audio. A good narrator would have no problem, but I have no skills in that field. Audiobook narration is expensive for a reason. People like Ray Porter have the gear, they have acting experience, good, clear pronunciation, and a talent for this that I can’t hope to emulate.

But maybe I’m just making excuses. Here’s the snippet I mentioned above. Check it out and let me know what you think.