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#texttospeech

42 posts9 participants1 post today

Ah, Book 10 in the Outlander world by #DianaGabaldon has gotten a title:
"A Blessing For A Warrior Going Out".

Beautiful title, eh?
In her blog she says, it doesn't mean Jamie is going to die, in fact he won't die in the book, but just alludes to that St Michael's blessing when a man goes to war that she uses once in a while in the novels.
No publishing date, as the novel isn't finished.
(Any news on GameOfThrones, by the way?)

Am at my 4th read of the series. This time, what really gets on my nerves is how she changes back and forth which facts each character knows.
Mostly, the pattern is: character x suddenly doesn't know fact y.
Eg, wee Ian knew Will as Jamie's son since the incident with the snake in the loo.
In later books he doesn't know it and is surprised to recognize Jamie's features in Will's, a bit later still, Ian again for the first time recognizes Will as Jamie's son .

Or the stuff the travellers assume about their ability changes back and forth, and often in between, contradicting their current train of thought around the matter.
Or which non-traveller knows that character x is a traveller changes back to not knowing.

Annoying. Because it interrupts my immersive reading experience quite a lot when it gets me wondering: what if this character had remembered correctly what he already knew – how would the story, or this particular moment have played out?

Anyway. So Book 10 now has a title.

dianagabaldon.com/wordpress/20

And I found that the Australien iphone voice Karen <premium> is reading #textToSpeech "Go Tell The Bees That I'm Gone" in the Books.app remarkably well. It really works. On iOS 18.5.
Also tested Calibre's content server where the book is presented in Safari on the iPhone. But Calibre doesn't support scrolling at all well in Safari.

I think, the best German voice is Yannik for novels. But it appears to be a bit more glitchy around page turns than Karen in the Books.app .
Surprised how well this works. Not annoying or off-putting at all. Both, Karen and Yannik. That each voice received its own settings page also helps, eg. pause between sentences, pitch and equalizer.
A professional reader like Davina Porter is of course wonderful. But I don't want to cough up € 40 for the audiobook, sorry.

Oh, and Davina Porter is not going to to read #Book10 because she is retired now.

dianagabaldon.comGOOD OMENS | DianaGabaldon.comWell, first things first— A Very (slightly ex post facto…) Happy Birthday to Sam Heughan! When he was first cast to play Jamie Fraser, I noted that he was born on April 30th, while Jamie’s birthday is May 1st—one on either side of the Beltane fire. Beltane is the Celtic fire festival that marks the beginning of summer, so plainly a time of good omens. As it turned out, it was indeed a time of good omens for All Things Outlander, so it seems an appropriate time to offer up two bits of (what I assume will be) further Good News. One on either side of the fire, as it were… The newly recorded audiobook of OUTLANDER, recorded by Kristin Atherton (the lovely actress who played the “mature” version of Jenny Murray in Season Seven), was released just yesterday, and I’m pleased to see that so many people already are excited about it and delighted with the quality. (This in no way denigrates the wonderful Davina Porter, who has read […]

Darum fällt Europas wohl bekanntester Biker-Konvoi in Hamburg aus | Regional

Hamburg – Eine Ära endet: Der Hamburger Motorradgottesdienst („Mogo“), Europas größter Biker-Gottesdienst, muss 2025 und in der Zukunft…
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europesays.com/de/191858/