Friday, August 26, 2011

Moved the Progress Bar to 70%

This is based on an estimated 100k words for draft #2. I got back transcriptions for a couple chapters today for 4400 new words. These are not polished chapters by any stretch, but they give me something I can work with. I read through a little of it, and aside from character names spelled wrong and some difficulty the transcriptionist had in determining what character was talking, it turned out very, very well. I'm also quite happy with the quality of the "writing" considering I was just making it up as I walked along.

I found I have a habit of switching to present tense while dictating. Oh well. That's easily fixed. It's certainly easier than using Dragon speech recognition since I don't have to dictate all the punctuation.

What I really, really love about this process is how fast it is. Because I couldn't see what I was saying, I couldn't go back and change it. Dictating forces me to keep going forward in the story. I went for an hour walk and came back with 4400 words! It would take me all day to type that because I'd be obsessively rewriting the whole time.

Even more good news: I did it again today. I went for a long walk (nearly two hours) and dictated two more chapters, one of which is a very difficult one that I was a little trepidatious about. But the first draft of that is behind me now. Well, actually its somewhere in the cloud waiting to be transcribed. I expect today's work to be another 5000 words.

Tomorrow I hope to knock out a couple more chapters. At this rate, I'll get the first draft of the last third done quickly, and then I'll be able to go through it and refine and complete.