u/MycologistForeign577

Hi there! I finished my novel! It is called Sound Before Sight and I was wondering if there was anyone out there willing to exchange manuscripts and beta read for each other.

This is what my novel is about ::Annika Leroux is a musicologist at a small liberal arts college in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts who has spent seven years building an argument about a famous piece of music: Debussy’s 1910 piano prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie — The Sunken Cathedral. Her argument is that Debussy wasn’t imagining a cathedral rising from the sea. He was transcribing one. That under specific tidal and atmospheric conditions on the Breton coast of France, the acoustic phenomena the prelude describes are real, verifiable, and have been documented in fishermen’s accounts for two centuries.

She goes to Douarnenez to find out if she’s right.

She is.

The novel runs in three nine-year cycles — 2008, 2017, 2026 — each time Annika returns to the Breton coast when the conditions converge. In the first cycle she meets Anaïs, a Carmelite organist who has been logging the same acoustic events in her own notebook for six years, in her own notation system, without instruments. Anaïs has been on this headland since she was eighteen. She knows the coast the way Annika knows the prelude — at a depth notation can’t reach. And she is trans, her self-knowledge arriving not through a secular framework but through the contemplative tradition she inhabits — through Thérèse of Lisieux and John of the Cross, through the specific spiritual practice that structures her days. It is handled in the novel’s oblique register: the binder under the habit, the habit as relief rather than constraint, nothing announced and nothing explained.

Something else happens on the coast. The data confirms it. The methodology cannot account for it. The novel refuses to explain it.
The love story takes eighteen years.
I think (and hope!) the story comes across as authentically human, beautiful, messy, and complicated … like so many of our lives.
The mechanism at the center of Sound Before Sight remains unresolved because resolution would be dishonest. The love story takes eighteen years because anything faster would be untrue to who these two people are. The novel is fearless about withholding and I believe it is honest about what it withholds and why. I am also hoping that this resonates with LGBTQIA+ and trans voices and that they appreciate Anaïs — and the care with which she is rendered — and that I might find readers here who understand what the novel is doing with her.

I am so interested and willing to help
another writer as well!! If you’re interested please let me know!!! Thank you. 😊

Hi there! I finished my novel! It is called Sound Before Sight and I was wondering if there was anyone out there willing to exchange manuscripts and beta read for each other.

This is what my novel is about ::�Annika Leroux is a musicologist at a small liberal arts college in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts who has spent seven years building an argument about a famous piece of music: Debussy’s 1910 piano prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie — The Sunken Cathedral. Her argument is that Debussy wasn’t imagining a cathedral rising from the sea. He was transcribing one. That under specific tidal and atmospheric conditions on the Breton coast of France, the acoustic phenomena the prelude describes are real, verifiable, and have been documented in fishermen’s accounts for two centuries.

She goes to Douarnenez to find out if she’s right.

She is.

The novel runs in three nine-year cycles — 2008, 2017, 2026 — each time Annika returns to the Breton coast when the conditions converge. In the first cycle she meets Anaïs, a Carmelite organist who has been logging the same acoustic events in her own notebook for six years, in her own notation system, without instruments. Anaïs has been on this headland since she was eighteen. She knows the coast the way Annika knows the prelude — at a depth notation can’t reach. And she is trans, her self-knowledge arriving not through a secular framework but through the contemplative tradition she inhabits — through Thérèse of Lisieux and John of the Cross, through the specific spiritual practice that structures her days. It is handled in the novel’s oblique register: the binder under the habit, the habit as relief rather than constraint, nothing announced and nothing explained.

Something else happens on the coast. The data confirms it. The methodology cannot account for it. The novel refuses to explain it.�
The love story takes eighteen years.�
I think (and hope!) the story comes across as authentically human, beautiful, messy, and complicated … like so many of our lives.
The mechanism at the center of Sound Before Sight remains unresolved because resolution would be dishonest. The love story takes eighteen years because anything faster would be untrue to who these two people are. The novel is fearless about withholding and I believe it is honest about what it withholds and why. I am also hoping that this resonates with LGBTQIA+ and trans voices and that they appreciate Anaïs — and the care with which she is rendered — and that I might find readers here who understand what the novel is doing with her.

I am so interested and willing to help
another writer as well!! If you’re interested please let me know!!! Thank you. 😊

Hi there! I finished my novel! It is called Sound Before Sight and I was wondering if there was anyone out there willing to exchange manuscripts and beta read for each other.

This is what my novel is about ::
Annika Leroux is a musicologist at a small liberal arts college in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts who has spent seven years building an argument about a famous piece of music: Debussy’s 1910 piano prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie — The Sunken Cathedral. Her argument is that Debussy wasn’t imagining a cathedral rising from the sea. He was transcribing one. That under specific tidal and atmospheric conditions on the Breton coast of France, the acoustic phenomena the prelude describes are real, verifiable, and have been documented in fishermen’s accounts for two centuries.

She goes to Douarnenez to find out if she’s right.

She is.

The novel runs in three nine-year cycles — 2008, 2017, 2026 — each time Annika returns to the Breton coast when the conditions converge. In the first cycle she meets Anaïs, a Carmelite organist who has been logging the same acoustic events in her own notebook for six years, in her own notation system, without instruments. Anaïs has been on this headland since she was eighteen. She knows the coast the way Annika knows the prelude — at a depth notation can’t reach. And she is trans, her self-knowledge arriving not through a secular framework but through the contemplative tradition she inhabits — through Thérèse of Lisieux and John of the Cross, through the specific spiritual practice that structures her days. It is handled in the novel’s oblique register: the binder under the habit, the habit as relief rather than constraint, nothing announced and nothing explained.

Something else happens on the coast. The data confirms it. The methodology cannot account for it. The novel refuses to explain it.

The love story takes eighteen years.

I think (and hope!) the story comes across as authentically human, beautiful, messy, and complicated … like so many of our lives.
The mechanism at the center of Sound Before Sight remains unresolved because resolution would be dishonest. The love story takes eighteen years because anything faster would be untrue to who these two people are. The novel is fearless about withholding and I believe it is honest about what it withholds and why. I am also hoping that this resonates with LGBTQIA+ and trans voices and that they appreciate Anaïs — and the care with which she is rendered — and that I might find readers here who understand what the novel is doing with her.

I am so interested and willing to help
another writer as well!! If you’re interested please let me know!!! Thank you. 😊

Hi there! I finished my novel! It is called Sound Before Sight and I was wondering if there was anyone out there willing to exchange manuscripts and beta read for each other.

This is what my novel is about ::
Annika Leroux is a musicologist at a small liberal arts college in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts who has spent seven years building an argument about a famous piece of music: Debussy’s 1910 piano prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie — The Sunken Cathedral. Her argument is that Debussy wasn’t imagining a cathedral rising from the sea. He was transcribing one. That under specific tidal and atmospheric conditions on the Breton coast of France, the acoustic phenomena the prelude describes are real, verifiable, and have been documented in fishermen’s accounts for two centuries.

She goes to Douarnenez to find out if she’s right.

She is.

The novel runs in three nine-year cycles — 2008, 2017, 2026 — each time Annika returns to the Breton coast when the conditions converge. In the first cycle she meets Anaïs, a Carmelite organist who has been logging the same acoustic events in her own notebook for six years, in her own notation system, without instruments. Anaïs has been on this headland since she was eighteen. She knows the coast the way Annika knows the prelude — at a depth notation can’t reach. And she is trans, her self-knowledge arriving not through a secular framework but through the contemplative tradition she inhabits — through Thérèse of Lisieux and John of the Cross, through the specific spiritual practice that structures her days. It is handled in the novel’s oblique register: the binder under the habit, the habit as relief rather than constraint, nothing announced and nothing explained.

Something else happens on the coast. The data confirms it. The methodology cannot account for it. The novel refuses to explain it.

The love story takes eighteen years.

I think (and hope!) the story comes across as authentically human, beautiful, messy, and complicated … like so many of our lives.
The mechanism at the center of Sound Before Sight remains unresolved because resolution would be dishonest. The love story takes eighteen years because anything faster would be untrue to who these two people are. The novel is fearless about withholding and I believe it is honest about what it withholds and why. I am also hoping that this resonates with LGBTQIA+ and trans voices and that they appreciate Anaïs — and the care with which she is rendered — and that I might find readers here who understand what the novel is doing with her.

I am so interested and willing to help
another writer as well!! If you’re interested please let me know!!! Thank you. 😊