Day 1057 - Broke my dictation streak

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I was simply way too busy last week to get my work done, and so I broke my dictation streak. :(

I just had a lot of house chores to do, and then I had office hours and homework for the book launch course I’m taking. The course has been really useful so far, but taking a lot of time because I find myself wanting to attend all the office hours in order to learn from other students’ questions.

I also made a mistake and kind of? broke my website. That whole thing was really stressful and ate up a ton of time on Saturday.

So rather than trying to stress myself out and try to squeeze in my dictation, I decided to just do some of the cleanup editing I never got around to doing, and then called it a day.

Even though I know that skipping dictation makes it slower the next time I do dictation, it’s just a bit too difficult to try to find something to dictate every single day. It’s easier because I’m working on two projects at once, but not when one of those projects is imply editing an old manuscript rather than writing a new one.

On top of that, I need to do research for a novella I need to write for a multi-author box set that’ll be releasing this October, so there really is nothing else for me to dictate. And if my blocking notes aren’t prepared for the next scene, I can’t dictate the scene.

So I decided to just not worry about a dictation streak right now.

Not having to keep up my dictation streak also made it less stressful when I got a bad IBS flareup on Saturday. It wasn’t debilitating pain, but it was uncomfortable and distracting, and I ended up only doing my coursework yesterday and the bare minimum of writing.

I feel better today, and so I went to office hours for my course. There’s also no homework today so I went for a walk and got about an hour of dictation done, finishing a scene I was working on. The problem is that I lost about 10 minutes of dictated words when I paused my digital voice recorder and forgot to turn it back on. :( So my words per hour is low, but at least I got the scene finished.

Unfortunately, I now have a ton of cleanup editing to do since I opted to dictate over cleaning up my writing. If anything, I’m predictable.

I’ve been neglecting my Hawaii book recently, but now that I’m done with that scene in the Regency, I think I’ll shift gears and work on my Hawaii book tomorrow.

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