Day 886: Seeing what I dictate

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I had a bad IBS flareup the past few days, and I'm still not feeling well but I wanted to get some work done today. I took some medication but was still dealing with pain and nausea, but I just powered through it to get some marketing work done.

My book is releasing on the 16th this month, and I had some issues with uploading it to Kindle with the ISBN I had purchased from Bowker. After chatting (rather fruitlessly) with Amazon customer service, I finally tried a different ISBN number and that seemed to work. So now I'll have to deal with customer service with Bowker in order to fix it (and likely they'll say nothing's wrong with the ISBN and the problem was with Amazon).

I was still feeling crappy so I was only going to do the bare minimum of writing today, and I started work on my manuscript, typing in 4thewords. However, I started feeling better as I was writing and I ended up writing more. I also accidentally started a large word count monster, which made me write even more words than that.

So as a result of feeling better and making the mistake of starting a large word count monster, I ended up writing quite a lot today.

The ironic thing was that my writing speed (while typing) was maybe a bit higher than if I dictate and then do the cleanup editing.

Also, it was a lot easier for me to just start the work when it only involved opening the document and starting to type. There was none of the procrastination and resistance that I have to battle with dictation. I suspect it's because typing is easier than dictation.

Also, I found that I actually enjoyed myself more when typing and writing. Although that might again be because the typing is easier than the dictation—I'm still not used to letting the writing go to my mouth rather than my hands, and I'm also not used to not seeing what I write.

Actually, the fact I can’t see what I’m dictating is probably my biggest issue with dictation. I wonder if I should try to dictate directly into my document? I tried it before and it seemed a bit difficult since the accuracy isn't quite as good as when Dragon analyzes a recording and then transcribes it, but after my experience writing today, maybe it's what I need.

Also, I can maybe use my previous experience with dictation so that it will be different this time when I dictate directly into my document. Before, I’d dictate and then correct mistakes, but maybe this time I’ll try to simply repeat what I said and keep going, and do the cleanup editing later. It’ll be almost exactly the same as dictating into a recording file, except that I’ll be able to see what I’m writing as I go.

I wanted to give this whole dictation thing a really earnest try, but I haven't been able to increase my dictation word speed, and I also haven't been very consistent in dictating every day since it's difficult. The writing today made me wonder if I should keep up trying to do the dictation when I haven’t been seeing much progress. It’s especially disheartening when I have days like today, when the typing was a bit faster than dictation.

Anyway, I worked for about an hour and got about 1300 words written. This is great considering I’ve been feeling really poorly for most of today. Even while I was writing, I still had to battle some nausea and pain, so the writing was difficult at times, but I still managed to get more done than I expected to.

Well, tomorrow will be 365 days on my writing streak! That’s exciting!

Writing streak: 364 days

My takeaway for today: Try to dictate directly into the document so that I can see what I’m writing as I dictate. Don’t stop to correct, just repeat yourself and keep going.

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