Dangerous Proofreading

I was moderately social last night. It was the last choir rehearsal of the summer, and a bunch of us went out to dinner after rehearsal. Although we spend a lot of time together, it's not really social time (or it's not supposed to be, but that seldom stops the sopranos), so I learned some fun things about choir members that I didn't know. Like, I learned that our tenor soloist went to the "Fame" high school in New York, and I learned that one of the sopranos (whose son was my teen helper for Vacation Bible School last summer) is almost as big a nerd as I am. I'd have never guessed it, but she's seriously into stuff like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter. I think we will need to chat more.

I'm in the proofreading phase of the book I'm working on. That's when I read the whole thing out loud. That forces me to read every word the way it's written instead of just seeing what I think should be there. It also makes awkward wording really obvious. The difficulty in doing this is that spending several hours a day reading out loud can be a strain on the voice. I'm a little raspy today, but I'm not sure if it's the reading or the combination of the reading and something else. I've read a whole book in a day that way without too much pain. I may have to whisper for today's reading and avoid other talking for a few days, since I have a choir workshop on Sunday afternoon and need to be able to sing then.

I should finish this one this week, and then I'll have to do the same thing again next week for the other project. And then I'm going to take my mid-summer "vacation," which will mostly be my preparation retreat for the next thing I plan to work on. That's time to watch movies that remind me of the story and read reference material. Since this is a revisiting of a backburnered project, I'll also re-read the existing draft, probably on my phone, so I'm not tempted to start editing until I've evaluated the whole thing. I've caught myself daydreaming scenes and thinking about the characters, so I think my subconscious is eager to get to work on this.