NanoWrimo update

[julesjones]

I ended up with a new and exciting medical excuse for staying away from the computer and thus not posting anything online during NaNoWriMo. However, I have several fountain pens, a stack of paper, and an edition of Dragon Naturally Speaking that will do transcription from a digital recording. Last time I dumped a batch of text into the computer it was up to 20 kwords, and I've probably added another couple of thousand since then. I have also experimented with Scrivener, which was one of my goals, and decided that it is not the gift from the gods many of my peers believe it to be, but it does do most of the things I found I missed on moving from Lotus Word Pro to Microsoft Word. I have *also* done something else on my to-do list, which is to track down a free speech recording utility for Windows 10 (it's part of Windows and is called Sound Recorder for those who may want to know this) and try it with Dragon's transcription module, as it would be useful the next time I mangled my wrist tendons. I hadn't really anticipated finding myself *needing* to use it for PicoWriMo, but at least I now know this system works.

Comments

[sallymn]

That sound record sounds interesting - my wrists are good, but I sometimes wonder if it would help to be able to get down stuff that way, even if I have to edit afterwards...

[julesjones]

I hate listening to the sound of my own voice on a recording, so the advice about "just record your thoughts and type them up later!" doesn't really work for me, and I find it difficult to compose fiction by voice rather than pen or keyboard. But this system really suits me. Write longhand, dictate it at a nice even pace without stopping to correct the speech recognition errors then and there so it doesn't disrupt my train of thought, set the transcription going, walk away and come back and fix the transcription errors later. I do a lot of writing on the bus during my commute, so getting this working is a boon.

If I wanted to just dictate on the fly, record and transcribe later would also work, but then I'd have to listen to my own voice to deal with the transcription errors... (The higher end editions of Dragon do actually have built-in recording as part of the transcription module but I don't really get on with it.)

[sallymn]

I'm not fond of my own voice playing back to me (I do have a slightly odd Anglo-Australian accent, I think) but years of HAVING to listen to it at work have cured most of the shudders....