Awwwwww yiss…I just clipped my fingernails! These fingers are so fresh and so CLEAN.
I wrote 2,634 words today on, I believe, day 3 of my 30-day challenge. Keep that shit up, and Imma have a new book by the end of this stretch (and that’s the idea, to be honest).
My transcription from the first day was garbage. Took me an hour to slog through it today. Very discouraging and frustrating. But, you know what? I made adjustments in day two and day three today with the placement of my mic and the gain on my recorder…and the difference is DRAMATIC. I even taught Dragon some of my funky proprietary words today.
I still have A LOT of anxiety and self consciousness over using dictation to write…it’s a very, very different process than sitting down at a keyboard. You’re just used to thinking much more slowly and deliberately at a keyboard, you know? Dictating is much, much faster, and that shit takes some getting used to.
I would say that what gives me the most anxiety about the whole new process at this point…four days in…is my “style.” It’s not the more clunky technical aspects like I thought it would be; things like saying “open quote” and “new line” all the time. That stuff is easy peasey…it’s translating my writing style with this new input method that’s by far the most challenging. I haven’t yet read a ton of what I’ve wrote and edited it…but I can just feel the difference. It’s so flat and basic right now, which is distressing.
BUT…but – I want to learn how to get over that hump. Because, man, there is no substitute for the speed with which I can write. It would normally take me two or three hours to write 2,600 words…that’s about 10 pages…and I did that shit in 45 minutes. And that’s not even close to as fast as I know I can get with dictating. That’s me stopping and starting and searching for sentences like a MFer. I can double that time, I think.
I think I’m going to start writing my word count for the day at the beginning of each post for the next 26 days of this “challenge.” Just to keep that in the forefront of my mind. THAT is the focus right now – getting a handle on this new way to write, getting comfortable with it. And I know I will if I just focus on that one goal of writing every day using dictation, going over what I wrote to see what it actually reads like, making corrections, and then getting back in front of that microphone again the next morning and trying to do just a little bit better.
It’s definitely taken the wind out of my sails lately, this anxiety over what I’m doing – starting a new book AND writing it in a completely different way than I’ve ever written anything. I find myself exhausted for most of the afternoons, now, which I definitely don’t like. Doing VO work has taken a big hit because of that…but, even that I will get down. Even that, I shall figure out. Just have to keep my eye on one goal at a time until all the paralyzing, exhausting nervousness melts away, and then I can add back in some other shit.
That’s the plan.
It’s time for the sleeps. Two Guys One Trek has been blowing up lately thanks to our guest spot on the Trek Geeks podcast – which makes me realize I never posted that up on our own site. I’ll rectify that situation tomorrow. We were all over it, of course, on the social medias, and we’ve made some new friends already 🙂 Very exciting.
Anywho…enough for tonight. More of the same tomorrow, and Liz’s sister comes into town, as well as Kerry! Huzzah 🙂