Reading again by listening

I never read my books after they are published. I occasionally update errors I discover or that readers point out, but I never read a book again from cover to cover. I have too many other things I would rather do with my limited time, like writing and editing my next work.

That said, I will listen to books again. When converting books to audio, I will review the narrator's "first drafts" and listen for any flaws. In the process, I will re-experience novels I wrote sometimes years earlier.

Last month, I did just that. For several hours — 11.5 to be exact — I listened to Crown City, the fifth and final book in the Time Box series. I listened to Roberto Scarlato, a skilled voice artist, bring a familiar work to life.

As I did, I revisited storylines, characters, and passages I had put on the shelf on November 26, 2021, when I published the Kindle edition of Crown City. I revisited many things I liked and a few I did not.

When you read or listen to a book months, or even years, after producing it, you view it differently. You tell yourself, "I'm glad I did this," or "I wish I had done that." You view your own work as a person with different knowledge, experience, priorities, and biases.

In the tenth of his Top 20 rules for writers, Stephen King advises scribes to finish their first draft within three months. He does so for a reason that makes perfect sense to those of us who have produced a novel.

When you write something over the course of months, you change. Your characters change. Your plotlines and story arcs change. A tale that made sense in April may not make sense in September.

Listening to a book years after it was published gives me the opportunity to spot things I might have done differently. It gives me the chance to see what I did right or wrong and apply that knowledge to future works.

It also gives me the opportunity to appreciate the work of my narrators, who wrestle with difficult personal names, place names, unusual words, and even phrases in foreign languages. As one who grew up in Washington state, which has tripwire place names like Puyallup and Sequim, and attended college at the University of Oregon, where students wore shirts shouting "Orygun" and "Willamette, damn it!" to educate some out-of-staters, I understand the challenges.

Fortunately for me — and listeners — the narrators have risen to the challenge. Mr. Scarlato, who has narrated my last five audiobooks, has done a particularly good job. He successfully navigated the minefield of Hawaiian and Japanese names in The Refuge and nailed the many distinct accents in Camp Lake, The Fair, Sea Spray, and Crown City. He did justice to novels I rediscovered for the second time.

With the arrival of Crown City, which goes live on Amazon, Audible, and Apple Books this week, I now have twenty books in audio. I intend to convert the remaining four and others in the coming years.