Day 800, Dictation, day 15: Freewrite exercises to prevent silences

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I took a sick day yesterday because I had bad IBS. It wasn’t painful, but the sharp, intermittent bouts of nausea were simply too much for me to handle.

I’m still lacking in discipline to get to bed on time, and got to bed too late last night. As a result, I woke up late today. However, I got most of my “frogs” done except for my marketing.

Instead of doing my marketing, I decided to push it off for later and try to get it done after writing (I ended up not getting it done before bedtime). I went out for a walk and dictated for about an hour and a half. I wanted to dictate for longer, but I started getting IBS nausea again. Also, my back started hurting because I had taken a bottle of water with me on the walk since it was so hot, and the weight of the water made my back ache. So I turned home a little earlier than I had wanted.

My dictation speed was about the same as my overall average, which is a little over 2000 words per hour. I’m a bit disappointed since I had been hoping to improve. I had been trying to not stop dictating very often, but I ended up needing to think a lot about where I wanted the scene to go, and so I probably had a lot of dead space.

Before my dictation, the exercise I did was a free write, and I think that helped me to practice not stopping. I think I’ll try that exercise again for a few days to see if it does help me to get used to constantly dictating without stopping.

As far as word count, I got about 3800 usable words in 3 hours, 48 minutes. It’s a little over 1000 words per hour, which is higher than my average when I type. I shouldn’t be disappointed since that’s still a pretty good word count for the day, but I can’t help but wish I could dictate faster (without having too many errors) and get more words done. I’ll keep practicing so that I can hopefully increase my dictation speed.

My dream is to dictate at 5000 words an hour for about 2 hours (which would require about 2 more hours for transcription and cleanup editing), and get 10,000 words done in a day. I actually was dictating at close to that speed for my dictation exercise (free writing). I dictated a little over 1000 words in 13 minutes. So I think it might be possible!

Writing streak: 279 days

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