Day 789: Dictation day 6
I once again got a late start because of IBS, but it was because I overslept. The IBS pain made it difficult for me to sleep well last night, and so this morning I turned off my alarm and went back to sleep. I feel better now, although my IBS is still bothering me a little bit.
When I decided to simplify my writing day, I stopped writing 100 words on my Hawaii book every day, and instead decided to do my Hawaii book one day a week. At first I did it on Thursdays since I tend to have a lot of house chores on that day, but recently I decided to switch it to Saturdays because I found that I tend to have more interruptions to my afternoons on Saturdays. I can get away with writing fewer words on my Hawaii book since I’m only writing a chapter (about 3000 words) a month, and my day’s word count goal is only about 750 words, so having less writing time on Saturdays won’t impact my writing goal for the day.
When working on my Hawaii book, some chapters are entirely new writing, but some chapters are just revising what I’d written before. The current chapter I was working today on is like that, just revising the original chapter. As a result, I got a lot written/revised today in only half an hour.
*
I thought about working on the next chapter, but then I started looking into translating my Hawaii serial novel into Japanese using Deepl.com. My Japanese vocabulary is poor, but I know enough grammar by now to be able to skim a sentence translated by Deepl and be able to guess if it’s correct or wonky. If it doesn’t seem quite right, I can adjust the English or adjust the Japanese. The translation won’t be as good as by an actual translator, but I think it might be adequate for a serial novel being posted on my blog. When I finish the book, I can look into having the Japanese edited before compiling it into a book.
Anyway, I did some translation of the back cover description, and I also worked on adding some pages to the Japanese section of my website for the Warubozu Spa Chronicles series. The translation is really hard, even though Deepl does all the heavy lifting—I have to check every sentence, which is easier with jisho.org, but it’s still tiring for my brain to read all that Japanese.
It took a really long time just for a few hundred words, so I decided to think more about if I really want to translate my Hawaii serial novel. I’m already a bit behind on keeping up with my marketing work, and that’s after doing 30 minutes of marketing almost every day. I would need to do some translation every day, too, which would be more time.
While I would really, really love to post the Japanese translation of my Hawaii serial novel chapters on my blog alongside the English version, I’ll have to think more about if I have the time to do it. I might need to try doing the translation over the next month to see if it’s even doable.
*
Even though I didn’t need to do any dictation for my Hawaii book, I wanted to still do some dictation today. I want to continue doing dictation everyday to practice it. Also, in Fool Proof Dictation: A No-Nonsense System for Effective & Rewarding Dictation by Christopher Downing, he mentions that he dictates at least the exercises every day, and suggests that you always practice dictation, like practicing an instrument, so your skills don’t get rusty.
His particular exercises seem targeted to have you write short stories. He says that even though they are projects outside your normal manuscript, they aren’t really “wasted words” since stories can always be compiled into anthologies or used for various marketing purposes. However for me personally, I don’t have as much use for short stories, so I’ve been doing his exercises on my side novel, or on prompts aimed at improving my writing career mindset.
However, I appreciate that his exercises seem to be flexible in what fiction pieces they can be used for, and that I can apply them to my side novel or to short stories, or to my favorite prompts. I also like how they focus on sentences, and how they seem to be specifically training your brain to think in sentences, which is easier for Dragon to transcribe.
Today, the exercises were (1) a ten minute stream-of-consciousness dictation where you speak slowly and don’t stop dictating the entire time, and (2) another sentence variation exercise where you do a pattern of 4 short sentences and then 1 complex sentence with dependent modifiers.
I brainstormed about translating my Hawaii book during the stream-of-consciousness exercise, and then for the sentence variation exercise, I dictated the blocking for my Regency side novel. I wasn’t very good at coming up with complex sentences, but I also got really into the blocking and ended up ditching the exercise to do a brainstorm/freewrite when I came across a few plot problems.
In general, though, the sentence variation exercises are rather good. The short simple sentences especially help me to organize my thoughts in small bite sized pieces. Also, since it’s just blocking, I can dictate one short sentence after another without worrying about it being good writing or having any sentence variation, and I’m able to practice thinking in short sentences. I think it will eventually help me with dictating my fiction.
I also think that doing the stream-of-consciousness exercise and not stopping helped me to not pause quite so much when I was doing the blocking. I am starting to see how these exercises might help me improve my dictation ability.
I ended up walking and dictating much longer than I was supposed to, so my dictation exercise turned into an hour of blocking on my Regency side novel!
*
Ugh, I took too long after dinner before getting to my dictation to transcribe it to clean it up. It’s way too late now!
I dictated for 59 minutes and wrote 2076 words of raw dictation. I forgot to start the timer when transcribing, so I didn’t record it. It took me 19 minutes to do the clean-up edit, and I ended up with 1341 usable words from the blocking. I had a lot of repetition, so I ended up deleting a lot.
My writing speed for the raw dictation was 2111 words per hour, but when I compare the final usable words and the total amount of time the dictation and clean-up took, my writing speed was 1031 words per hour. That’s still a pretty good speed—certainly faster than when I usually do blocking on my outlines.
When dictating, even though I repeated ideas a lot, in general I kept dictating to try to brainstorm and figure out logic problems I came across. So that’s why I dictated so much, but also why I cut so much from the final words.
However, this trick of dictating to brainstorm seemed to have worked better than I would have expected. Since I was walking outside, I just kept dictating and focusing on the problem. I’ve been trying to practice how to focus more intently, and it’s a lot easier to do when I’m out walking and dictating. From what was supposed to be only a dictation exercise, I managed to do some decent blocking for the scene.
*
I forgot to download a graphic of my writing progress today from 4thewords before it hit midnight! I’m bummed because I wrote a lot today, thanks to my dictation. Granted, most of the words I had to delete when I did the clean-up edit, but it did kind of stroke my ego to see that I’d written so many words via dictation.
Writing streak: 268 days
Hawaii series:
Editing: Time spent: 5 minutes
Writing: time spent: 28 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 1528 words
Regency series:
Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 18 minutes
Blocking: Total number of words: 1341 words
Writing-related business:
Email: time spent: 3 minutes
Marketing: time spent: 2 hours, 13 minutes (this includes some time I took to try to translate Year of the Dog’s back cover description)
My takeaway for today: The dictation exercises from Fool Proof Dictation really did seem to help me dictate a little bit better today, and to start learning to think in sentences.
My second takeaway for today: Walking and dictating my blocking really made me focus and brainstorm to figure out logic problems.
When I decided to simplify my writing day, I stopped writing 100 words on my Hawaii book every day, and instead decided to do my Hawaii book one day a week. At first I did it on Thursdays since I tend to have a lot of house chores on that day, but recently I decided to switch it to Saturdays because I found that I tend to have more interruptions to my afternoons on Saturdays. I can get away with writing fewer words on my Hawaii book since I’m only writing a chapter (about 3000 words) a month, and my day’s word count goal is only about 750 words, so having less writing time on Saturdays won’t impact my writing goal for the day.
When working on my Hawaii book, some chapters are entirely new writing, but some chapters are just revising what I’d written before. The current chapter I was working today on is like that, just revising the original chapter. As a result, I got a lot written/revised today in only half an hour.
*
I thought about working on the next chapter, but then I started looking into translating my Hawaii serial novel into Japanese using Deepl.com. My Japanese vocabulary is poor, but I know enough grammar by now to be able to skim a sentence translated by Deepl and be able to guess if it’s correct or wonky. If it doesn’t seem quite right, I can adjust the English or adjust the Japanese. The translation won’t be as good as by an actual translator, but I think it might be adequate for a serial novel being posted on my blog. When I finish the book, I can look into having the Japanese edited before compiling it into a book.
Anyway, I did some translation of the back cover description, and I also worked on adding some pages to the Japanese section of my website for the Warubozu Spa Chronicles series. The translation is really hard, even though Deepl does all the heavy lifting—I have to check every sentence, which is easier with jisho.org, but it’s still tiring for my brain to read all that Japanese.
It took a really long time just for a few hundred words, so I decided to think more about if I really want to translate my Hawaii serial novel. I’m already a bit behind on keeping up with my marketing work, and that’s after doing 30 minutes of marketing almost every day. I would need to do some translation every day, too, which would be more time.
While I would really, really love to post the Japanese translation of my Hawaii serial novel chapters on my blog alongside the English version, I’ll have to think more about if I have the time to do it. I might need to try doing the translation over the next month to see if it’s even doable.
*
Even though I didn’t need to do any dictation for my Hawaii book, I wanted to still do some dictation today. I want to continue doing dictation everyday to practice it. Also, in Fool Proof Dictation: A No-Nonsense System for Effective & Rewarding Dictation by Christopher Downing, he mentions that he dictates at least the exercises every day, and suggests that you always practice dictation, like practicing an instrument, so your skills don’t get rusty.
His particular exercises seem targeted to have you write short stories. He says that even though they are projects outside your normal manuscript, they aren’t really “wasted words” since stories can always be compiled into anthologies or used for various marketing purposes. However for me personally, I don’t have as much use for short stories, so I’ve been doing his exercises on my side novel, or on prompts aimed at improving my writing career mindset.
However, I appreciate that his exercises seem to be flexible in what fiction pieces they can be used for, and that I can apply them to my side novel or to short stories, or to my favorite prompts. I also like how they focus on sentences, and how they seem to be specifically training your brain to think in sentences, which is easier for Dragon to transcribe.
Today, the exercises were (1) a ten minute stream-of-consciousness dictation where you speak slowly and don’t stop dictating the entire time, and (2) another sentence variation exercise where you do a pattern of 4 short sentences and then 1 complex sentence with dependent modifiers.
I brainstormed about translating my Hawaii book during the stream-of-consciousness exercise, and then for the sentence variation exercise, I dictated the blocking for my Regency side novel. I wasn’t very good at coming up with complex sentences, but I also got really into the blocking and ended up ditching the exercise to do a brainstorm/freewrite when I came across a few plot problems.
In general, though, the sentence variation exercises are rather good. The short simple sentences especially help me to organize my thoughts in small bite sized pieces. Also, since it’s just blocking, I can dictate one short sentence after another without worrying about it being good writing or having any sentence variation, and I’m able to practice thinking in short sentences. I think it will eventually help me with dictating my fiction.
I also think that doing the stream-of-consciousness exercise and not stopping helped me to not pause quite so much when I was doing the blocking. I am starting to see how these exercises might help me improve my dictation ability.
I ended up walking and dictating much longer than I was supposed to, so my dictation exercise turned into an hour of blocking on my Regency side novel!
*
Ugh, I took too long after dinner before getting to my dictation to transcribe it to clean it up. It’s way too late now!
I dictated for 59 minutes and wrote 2076 words of raw dictation. I forgot to start the timer when transcribing, so I didn’t record it. It took me 19 minutes to do the clean-up edit, and I ended up with 1341 usable words from the blocking. I had a lot of repetition, so I ended up deleting a lot.
My writing speed for the raw dictation was 2111 words per hour, but when I compare the final usable words and the total amount of time the dictation and clean-up took, my writing speed was 1031 words per hour. That’s still a pretty good speed—certainly faster than when I usually do blocking on my outlines.
When dictating, even though I repeated ideas a lot, in general I kept dictating to try to brainstorm and figure out logic problems I came across. So that’s why I dictated so much, but also why I cut so much from the final words.
However, this trick of dictating to brainstorm seemed to have worked better than I would have expected. Since I was walking outside, I just kept dictating and focusing on the problem. I’ve been trying to practice how to focus more intently, and it’s a lot easier to do when I’m out walking and dictating. From what was supposed to be only a dictation exercise, I managed to do some decent blocking for the scene.
*
I forgot to download a graphic of my writing progress today from 4thewords before it hit midnight! I’m bummed because I wrote a lot today, thanks to my dictation. Granted, most of the words I had to delete when I did the clean-up edit, but it did kind of stroke my ego to see that I’d written so many words via dictation.
Writing streak: 268 days
Hawaii series:
Editing: Time spent: 5 minutes
Writing: time spent: 28 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 1528 words
Regency series:
Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 18 minutes
Blocking: Total number of words: 1341 words
Writing-related business:
Email: time spent: 3 minutes
Marketing: time spent: 2 hours, 13 minutes (this includes some time I took to try to translate Year of the Dog’s back cover description)
My takeaway for today: The dictation exercises from Fool Proof Dictation really did seem to help me dictate a little bit better today, and to start learning to think in sentences.
My second takeaway for today: Walking and dictating my blocking really made me focus and brainstorm to figure out logic problems.
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