Recently my publisher reached out to me about doing an audiobook version of Holistic Tarot, but, you know, Holistic Tarot was like 850 pages, so an audiobook version would need to cut from a 200K+ word count down to maximum 85K. That’s like … crunch, crunch, crunch… 57.5% of the original book!

I like the idea of someone being able to put on their headphones and listen to educational content on the tarot while going about their day, multitasking. I could approach it as scripts to a podcast series, and each chapter is an episode that builds on the previous episode and leads to the next. So I said yes.

That said, the project has turned out to be a lot harder than I initially presumed. You can’t just cut out 115,000 words from the original text with no revisions to the remaining text and have it make sense. Not to mention my printed book was graphics, table, and chart intensive, so now I have to carefully review the manuscript to make sure it’s audio-friendly.

Funnier yet are some of the self-realizations that are happening while I reread something I wrote well over a decade ago.

One, tell me why it reads like AI wrote it even though this was a decade before LLMs. Em dashes galore. Compare-contrast sentence structure (FYI, that’s academic writing; it’s kinda how those of us who get graduate degrees were trained to write, especially in legal writing. “It’s not just ___, it’s ____” is littered all over any legal brief). Or starting sentences with Moreover, Nevertheless, Notwithstanding, Whereas… I mean crap, that’s still how I write contracts.

Actually, we know why — it’s not that I sound like AI. It’s that AI was trained to sound like academic writing, and my writing style at the time was academic, and not just academic, but specifically juris doctorate academic, and those kinds of publications were a big part of what AI learned from. Funny enough, I do recall back when HT first came out, I got a lot of criticism about how the book’s style came across as too dry, pedantic, even robotic.

Continue reading “Writing the Holistic Tarot Audiobook: Some Reflections” →