Rekka: 00:41 Welcome back to the Hybrid Author Podcast. If you are a regular listener, you may notice that my voice is a little bit huskier than usual. This is not a new affectation that I have intentionally taken on. I have a very good reason for it and, for the same reason, today’s episode will be a little bit more brief than usual. So, Parvus asked me to submit whatever version– this is a quote– of Salvage that I would be happy going out as an ARC and the deadline for that was April 15th, in order to avoid rush costs on printing those ARCs in time for the Nebulas, and I was very motivated to hit this deadline. And, of course, when you tell me that this is the copy going out for reviews, and that this is the year that Parvus has access to more reviewers than they did last year, and that some people are going to be reading Salvage without, probably, the benefit of reading Flotsam first, I was slightly staggered under the responsibility of what it meant to send out the copy that I would be happy if it went out as the ARC.

Rekka: 02:06  So I probably, well, I hopefully gave them the final draft sans copy-edits this time. So all my commas are probably in the wrong place because that is a thing that I do now. And I have had my commas corrected to the point where I no longer trust myself. So now my commas are not even in consistently incorrect spaces. I now question every comma. So I tried, as I made this review copy, to just ignore where my commas were. But I did, I did move like two or three, but every time I caught myself looking at commas as I read over the last version, I said, “Nope, you’re going to get it wrong anyway. Just ignore the commas. Put them where they feel good or leave them, and don’t think about it.” So the reason that I am super-husky is because I sent the rewritten intro and the– rippled revision.

Rekka: 02:45 In other words, I changed some details in the intro based on Parvus’ comments the last time, and needed to smooth out the wrinkles throughout the rest of the text. And I did that and finished it last week on Friday morning and sent that copy to Staples and had them print it for me. And then I stuck it in an enormous binder, which you may have seen on my Instagram if you follow bittybittyzap, and took this enormous binder and began reading out loud on Friday afternoon, and all day Saturday, and all day Sunday, and straight through to the beginning of my workday Monday and caught as many strange phrasings or repeated words or accidental words or just other errada that are the kinds of things that only turn up when you read your work out loud. So, I really do recommend that everybody read their work out loud.

Rekka: 04:02 I do not recommend that people do what I did, which is read a 170,000 word novel in the span of three days when I am sugar-free and cannot have honey. I choose not to have honey. I could have broken that for this weekend, but that’s a quality of life decision that I made and I stick to. But man, some honey did sound good. Luckily I made oxtail this weekend and, as it turns out, a really nice, fatty broth is fantastic. So after I record this, I will go inside because then I made bone broth from it. I will go inside and have a cup of oxtail bone broth so that I can maybe heal a little bit more. ‘Cause I also have a Patreon video to record today. So yes, read your work out loud. Do not read it out loud in a marathon and worry about deadlines quite as hard as I did this weekend. I just, you know, unless you can’t avoid it, which is why I did it. Because I could not avoid it. I wanted to hit that deadline, and I did, and hurray for me. Now I can hopefully recover.

Rekka: 05:15 So my plan for today’s episode, before I lost most of my ability to speak, was to sort of recap the podcast over the last...