I have committed fanfic

[julesjones]

 It is a long time since I've written fanfic. However, I've have been having plot bunnies recently, and one side effect of the 30 Days of Blake's 7 meme was that something got shaken loose for a vague thought I've had for quite a long time, and I finally knew how to write it. I have done so. By hand. With a fountain pen and paper.

Anyway, having transcribed it onto electrons, and reminded myself in the process why I do not use Dragon for actual composition of stories (it took me longer to monitor it and say "correct that" every couple of paragraphs than it would have to just use a keyboard), I have an accurate word count - almost exactly 13,000 words written over the course of two weeks. So nearly a thousand words a day on average, although it varied wildly on how much per day (there was one day when I probably wrote close to  two and half thousand).

So now I just have to come up with three names for walk-on characters that currently have [X] type placeholders, and send it off to a couple of beta readers. And then wonder what to do with it, because there are no zines anymore; and relatedly, what pseud to use, because I had one pseud for stuff that first appeared on dead trees and another for stuff that first appeared on live electrons, and there are no zines any more, but people started associating the former pseud with the blood-on-the-floor stuff and the latter with the cute and fluffy stuff, simply because that's how it played out with what went where when there were zines.

(Yes, I know AO3 exists. I have issues with OTW's views on whether it is appropriate for random people to copy the entire text of someone else's zine reviews on an unrelated site into Fanlore without bothering to mention this to the author, let alone ask permission to do so. Some day I will have the time and spoons to send a take-down notice for each and every one of the many stolen reviews.)

Comments

[heleninwales]

Years ago, when I was still teaching, I had problems with mild RSI and tried using Dragon for typing up text. Even though it was an early version, I was impressed, but the number of times you had to say, "Correct that," got frustrating and would derail your train of thought if you were trying to write first draft.

[julesjones]

A conversation I see go round every so often is a writer says they're having problems with typing because their wrists object, and someone (often several someones) pipes up with "you could use Dragon!", and the writers in the conversation have to explain that Dragon is a wondrous thing but is not suitable for typing first draft because a) "correct that" and b) punctuation - you either have to explicitly say the punctuation, which disrupts your chain of thought, or let it use its best guess and then have to go back and correct all the many places where its guess was wrong.

I have used it intermittently for 26 years, it has been the only way I could do my job for the last 15 or so, and I think it is a marvellous thing, but there is absolutely no way I could use it for composing fiction.

[heleninwales]

Also it mishears things, however carefully you try to pronounce the words. I always remember how he washed his hands and face turned into he washed his handsome face. And of course if you're writing fantasy with unusual names, it becomes very difficult.