Welcome everyone to day nine of the 28-day writing challenge. Over the course of 28 days, I’m writing another book. If you are writing a book yourself, maybe you’re following along with me and you are performing some of the daily tasks yourself. If not, you may just be wanting to see how I’m doing on this journey. I am trying to write a book in 28 days or less, without stressing myself to death. So far I’m succeeding at doing that, although a couple days it started to get a little bit stressful.
But today, I am happy to report to you that I am caught up! When I was talking to you last, I may have been a little bit mixed up but maybe I was caught up then. Or maybe I wrote another chapter after I got through talking with you. I don’t really remember which way it was. All I know is that today, I am caught up.
The only thing is I don’t have the next chapter blueprinted ahead of time, but I am caught up in the writing goals for this week. So I’m excited about that.
More About the Software
I told you yesterday that I was experimenting with using LilySpeech and LibreOffice. I am still really happy with those two pieces of software. The amazing thing is that they are both free. And they have such high quality so I’m quite excited about that.
I was having to get used to dictating again, that process is different than using your fingers to do the writing. So today I’ve come upon a solution. I found out that I could get the same number of words in three minutes of speaking as I could in five minutes of typing. That was good.
However, it was a little bit difficult. I found myself pausing a lot, and I wasn’t happy with how that was working. So I figured out that I was doing the dictation within three minutes.
So I tried another experiment. I set the timer for two minutes and practiced what I wanted to talk about. When the two minutes were up. I added another minute to the timer, set it again, and then I actually did the dictation. That worked much better and it was much smoother. I think there will be less editing in the future. Right now, the software is serving me very well and I’m quite pleased with it. (Bonus, I’m not getting carpal tunnel from doing all of that typing.)
Mini-Breaks
Since I was doing some of my typing tonight after regular business hours and I wanted to spend some time with my wife, I did two five-minute segments and then I would take a break. I walked around the house trying to get my 10,000 steps in for the day. I’d go to about 500 steps, and then sit down and try to find a piece of a puzzle that my wife and I are working on. Most of the time I was successful but not always.
This has been great. It was a way to write a book without stressing myself to death.
Well, I hope you have a great weekend and I will see you on Monday. That will be for day ten of the 28-day writing challenge. I hope you’re enjoying watching the struggles and joys. Thankfully, there have been more joys than struggles so far. Remember, YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!