Dictation Complete

I finished up dictating my outline this morning. It only took about an hour, but only about 3000 words. I began assembling the transcriptions this afternoon and I already know the word count will expand.

Apparently, I dictate a bit thin, which doesn't surprise me in the least. When I'm walking and talking I feel like I need to capture what's happening in the story without much decoration. The small bits of description I do are little short hand phrases to myself so I know how to expand upon them later. I want to do more of this.

Much like Mary Robinette Kowal uses brackets. Her blog post was a revelation, reminding me to get the story told and not agonize over the perfect turn of phrase in the midst of creative flow.

I'm very happy with how the dictated chapters turned out, though. Going through the text, fixing formatting issues and correcting basic grammatical stuff wasn't painful in the least. It was fun!

Earlier chapters in the book were also dictated using Dragon Naturally Speaking, which worked great. But I prefer using the transcription service because I can dictate in any environment, even with a bit of extraneous noise. It's more expensive, yes. But it's accurate and you don't have to speak the punctuation.

I'm moving the progress bar up to 93%! The progress will slow a little as I spend time passing through existing text. I'll declare draft #2 complete once it's ready to send to my editor.