Camy's Writing Diary

I finished book 6 in my Regency series! I actually took a nap in the middle of the day and then I felt a lot more refreshed afterward and got the last two chapters dictated. I finished doing the cleanup editing in the early hours of March 2nd, but I’m going to count it towards my writing for March 1st. This book took a lot less time to write than the others, and I think it’s because of the dictation. I dictate into a digital voice recorder and then have Dragon transcribe it, and I am able to focus much more intently when I dictate because I can’t see what I wrote so I’m not distracted or trying to edit it. If I forget what I just dictated (which unfortunately happens a lot) I just repeat it and keep going. Often I’ll pause or repeat myself until a sentence comes out the way I want, but I think I’ve been doing that less often lately because the cleanup has taken a little less time lately, too (but the cleanup still takes, in general, the same amount of time it took me to do the dictat...

Yesterday, my IBS bothered me a little, but I was hit hard by a sudden headache (I think it was because of my floor mopping solution, not from the usual culprit, my allergies). So I ended up not even being able to do much marketing since I didn’t want to do much reading and risk making the headache worse. I admit I procrastinated a bit after lunch, but finally got about 2 hours of work done editing my manuscript. Today isn’t much better. I don’t have a headache, but my IBS is a bit worse today. I admit I wasted some time looking at my Amazon ads this morning, but I managed to get a bit of other marketing work done, too. I should be able to get back to editing my manuscript after lunch, since I can usually edit even if the IBS is bothering me a little. *** Okay, I have to admit, I think I need the dictation streak. What happened was that I had to pretty much rewrite a scene, so I decided to dictate since the majority would be new writing. But since I missed dictation for 2 day...

I woke up yesterday with another IBS flare up, but I managed to get some marketing work done in the morning, which is stuff I can do despite the pain. It got only a little better in the afternoon, but I wanted to try to get some work done on the manuscript, so I decided to dictate a bit. I realized I needed to block the scene better, so I dictated my blocking notes and managed to get that done. I didn’t write any prose, but I was ready to start writing the scene today. Unfortunately I had some IBS pain this morning, and so I did a little bit of marketing instead. But the IBS didn’t decrease much by the afternoon, so I ended up doing dictation while still being a bit uncomfortable. I thought I’d only do a little dictation, but I ended up dictating about half the scene, approximately 3000 words, which took 75 minutes. My dictation speed wasn’t too bad, about 2500 words per hour. The cleanup editing took a little less time, 65 minutes. I made a decision today to change how I recorded ...

My IBS has been bothering me a bit lately. I think I ate too much of a food that is okay for me to eat, but only in moderate amounts. The pain has not been as bad as it has been before, but it has still been distracting. I'm doing a little bit of dictation every day. My bare minimum is only five minutes of dictation, but most days I do about 30 minutes dictation, and then the cleanup editing is another 30 minutes. I also try to do my cycling edit every day. So even though my IBS has been bothering me, I am still able to get work done on my book. I am approximately one third of the way through the book, but I had hoped to have more done on it by now. I started the book in early December, but I was busy because the previous book released in mid-December, and then I had a couple promotions to set up after that. Then I was traveling over Christmas, and got hardly anything done for about two weeks. I thought I would start getting more writing done after Christmas, but I have been ...

I felt absolutely terrible this morning, so I took medication and relaxed, waiting for the medicine to kick in and the symptoms to calm down. It took a while, longer than I had expected, and by then, I was so tired that it was hard to force myself to get started on work. However, it was my writing streak that saved me this time. I try to do at least 100 words each day, and I hadn’t yet done my writing for the day, so I needed to at least sit at my desk to get that done. Just the act of firing up my computer helped get me in a better frame of mind, and I got started on my writing almost immediately. I wasn’t even aiming for only 100 words—I was ready to work as long as it took to finish the scene I was writing, since I had stopped in the middle yesterday. I finished the scene and decided to start the next one, and finished that, too. I think it really is very motivating for me to set scene goals rather than word count goals for each day. I seem to end up getting a lot more done that...

I admit, I have not been feeling well all day. My IBS has been bothering me on and off, and even medication doesn't seem to help much. It's hard for me to write when I have IBS pain, so I decided to try to be productive despite how I was feeling, and I did my “frogs.” I read that Elana Johnson does about one hour of marketing a day. I don't have as much marketing as she does, but she also has assistants. I thought I would try it, since I have been feeling lately that I have too much marketing work to do and doing only 30 minutes a day still leaves me behind with a lot of things. After doing my “frogs,” I wasn't feeling great, but I decided to try to walk and dictate anyway. I figured that even a few minutes will enable me to write a few hundred words. I hadn't thought about this before, but I had been dictating when the weather was nice. Now that it's very hot in the afternoon, I have to be more careful about going out to walk and dictate. I could dictate ...

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 c...

I started re-reading another dictation book, Fool Proof Dictation: A No-Nonsense System for Effective & Rewarding Dictation by Christopher Downing. It doesn’t offer as much practical advice for beginning dictating authors like Monica Leonelle’s book Dictate Your Book: How To Write Your Book Faster, Better, and Smarter , but the advice he does give is spot on, at least for me. His first drill (he calls them Tryouts) is to read out loud a passage in exactly 2 minutes, 15 seconds. The reason is because that would be a reading pace of 5000 words per hour. It was really amazing to me how slow that seemed, and yet that was 5000 words per hour. He suggests getting your body used to that dictation speed because it gives you good accuracy on Dragon, or whatever speed you end up liking best that gives you good accuracy. I especially like how he does several warm-up exercises before he even starts dictating his fiction. He writes, “I learned that revving up my brain before I dictate scen...

I guess my daily writing blog has become filled with dictation and my experiences with it. I have also found it helpful to dictate my thoughts on some of the dictation books I’ve been reading (or re-reading). This is the book I read last night: 15-Minute Dictation by Sean Platt and Neeve Silver It's a nice, short book. I like the fact that he addresses the problem of rewiring your brain, which was the aspect of dictation that I was having the most problems with. He addresses that this rewiring process requires consistency, doing dictation every day for a few weeks to get more used to it. Here's a quote: “Fortunately, you already know how to talk. And you already know how to tell stories. Think of them as two train stations in your brain. We're going to lay track in between them to forge a permanent connection that makes it easier for you to talk your stories. ” Page 55 Like other dictation books, he recommends practicing dictation with other things besides your...

I had another late start to my day today because I had a bad IBS flare-up. My IBS has been bad for several days now, and I think I know what I had eaten to cause it (something that hadn’t affected me much before, but which caused problems this time). So, I decided to try dictating during my morning walk. I admit, yesterday's dictation was pretty awesome. It was much nicer to walk rather than sitting at my desk to write. And being outside my house forced me to only concentrate on my work, since there wasn't anything else for me to do, besides listen to music or an audiobook. I did have to train myself to stop speaking and pause my recorder when a car was going past, since one or two of the books on dictation I have read have mentioned that car noises can drown out the dictation and make it difficult for Dragon to transcribe. However once I got onto the walking trail, I didn't have to worry about cars, although I still did stop and pause the recording when I passed other ...

So I'm back to trying dictation for my fiction. I pulled out books on dictation which I had read before, and I started rereading them last night. One of my favorite books is Dictate Your Book: How To Write Your Book Faster, Better, and Smarter by Monica Leonelle. I'm not sure exactly what it is about this book that I really like, except that maybe I just like her writing voice and writing style. In my opinion, her advice is very practical. I especially like one of her early pieces of advice which is to ease into dictation slowly. She suggests that instead of using dictation right away to work on your book, which I think is what most writers would expect to do, she suggests using dictation for other things so that you get used to the procedure of dictation and what it feels like to speak text. She suggests dictating emails and blog posts and lists and other small things instead of your book.
 I think I agree with her. I forgot to mention yesterday that this is my third or...