Last year, I started walking again, for my health, my sanity, and mostly to escape the craziness that is sometimes my life.

I enjoy walking. What I don’t enjoy is the self-dialogue I conduct while I put one foot in front of the other. For whatever reason, getting out in the open air brought out a very nasty critic. I tried consciously changing my tone, the topics of conversation, even adopted some affirmations to repeat, mantra like, with each third step. Nothing worked. Plugging into my IPOD helped a little. However, not even music could drown out that hateful voice. Then, I discovered audiobooks. Wow. What a delight. Focused on the book, I hear nothing else (no dogs barking, cars honking, kids screaming) except the narrator’s voice. Hallelujah! The critical voice was gone. Needless to say, I enjoy walking so much now that I go nearly every day.

In fact, I enjoy walking to audio books so much that I subscribed to Audible.com*. I’ve found that my listening reader is much more tolerant of new authors than my visual reader, so I’m often trying out new authors mixed in with some timeless favorites. Just this week, I picked up What’s a Ghoul to Do, by Victoria Laurie. Now, first off, I love the premise and so far I am enjoying the story line. There’s nothing I love more than ghosts and ghost stories. Still, to my dismay, several sentences into the book, I winced. The narrator continued and I winced again.

What was with all the “I said, she said” back and forth dialogue tags? Every other line in some places. Gah!

As I’m an author as well as a reader, I’ve heard it said, more often than I’d like, that using he said, she said, I said as a dialogue tag is invisible. Well, I’m here to tell you now that SAID ain’t invisible in an audio book. Oddly, this is the first audio book I’ve encountered with an overabundance of those “invisible” words. I’m hoping that this is simply a debut author mistake and not some overzealous editor who demanded they be added “because said is invisible” to readers.

I can see said; I especially can hear said. Can’t you?

*Just sayin’….I’m in no way affiliated with Audible.com, they have no idea who I am, nor do they carry any of my books (that I know of, anyway)…so this promotional plug is just to let interested readers know where they can go to get audio books. Libraries, bookstores, and other online retailers also carry them. But, I got a free book when I joined audible and I’ve had nothing but a good experience with them. Your mileage may vary.