My fellow writing partner showed me a piece of software she had downloaded on her laptop before we went our separate ways after our “writing date”. It’s called ReadPlease 2003. Best of all, you can download it for FREE! Yes, I said free. And better still, it sounds natural. It’s not that tinny, monotone voice that some reading software programs have.

I downloaded it as soon as I got home and tried it out for myself. I copied and pasted the first chapter of my WIP manuscript into it and hit the play button. The software read what I’d written back to me.

In the free version of the software, there are four voices to choose from – two male and two female so you can choose the person you want to read your work back to you.

Reading your work aloud is the best way to judge the flow, pick up on wrong or missing words, or over-usage of a word within a short span of text. Now you can keep yourself from going hoarse and still get the job done.

ReadPlease can be found here: http://www.readplease.com/

After a great deal of aggravation, frustration and consternation, I finally got a proper “subscribe by e-mail” link set up on my blog. When I finally succeeded, the simplicity of it all was mind-boggling.

Here I’d been making it far more complicated than it needed to be. Anyway, to make a long story short, if you subscribe by e-mail to my blog, every time I put a new post up there, you’ll be notified.

Some months, I’m quite prolific on the blogging front… other months not so much.