Skip to main content

A change

Writing is up and down, and a bit hard at the moment. It is just so hard to settle down. So I’ve been investigating a few things to see if they might work. Different things. What is that saying? If its not working, you need to do it differently.

A WINTRY WALK

Thus I am considering… Dictation. The other day on my way to work I wrote a scene in the old noggin and said to myself, I’ll write that up when I get home.

Well, naturally, ten hours later when I got home, I couldn’t remember it the way I had so brilliantly done it while walking the streets.

Very disappointing. Hence researching dictation.

There is dictation software one can purchase where you record (and include things like punctuation as you speak) and then you send your audio to the programme and it writes it out. Sounds brilliant.

Barbara Cartland famously dictated to her secretary.

But I’ll start a bit more old school with speaking into a recorder and then transcribing it myself. I’ve done that before, transcribing. Talks and interviews. It takes a lot of time. A lot of time, but on the plus side, I don’t have to stop to replay something to figure out what was said, or the spelling, or so on. Because its me. I know my story.

I tried it with my phone in and it was shocking. Because I’m walking to work its rush hour and there are all the bikes and cars and trucks and motorbikes, not to mention the weather the wind, so you can get decent Dictaphones/voice recorders which will block out the noise.

That is the plan, so this week I’ll order a Dictaphone (rather, a voice recording device, Dictaphone is an old term), the stores I went to, to see these things for myself, didn’t have them in stock but I can order one in.

Here’s hoping I take to it and increase my productivity on my wintry walks!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wet weather

It is starting to get cooler, praise be. There was a heap of rain one day this week, and by the time I got to work I was damp, to put it mildly. Soaked is overstating it but uncomfortably wet. Have you ever tried to dry off your trousers with a hair dryer?  I would have been there forever! If only, I thought, I had a spare anything at work, like a skirt even, but no. Nothing to change into. There was only a pair of pantyhose in case I ripped them, although I had stuffed spare socks and boots in my bag so I could have dry feet at work. It is worth noting that the very next day I went to work, I had completely forgotten that thought about spare clothes altogether and did not take spare anything for future weather events. In fact, I only remembered as I was thinking about writing this blog post. Hopeless. Given I’m trying to keep up my walking part-way to work to get in a good 40 minutes/steps, I should take along spare clothes to keep in my locker just in case. It really was uncom...

My latest obsession

 I have recently been a bit obsessed with the practice of junk journalling. Junk jouraling! I love it so far. Its been around a few years and seems to have taken over a bit from from the scrapbooking of yore, but the thing I like about it is you use up all your stuff that is lying around. You can use all your rubbishy bits and pieces of paper and things. I like the tutorials of a lady called Leah with a channel called Thrifty Day , and I've had a go at it and I kind of really like doing it. Sometimes I feel a bit out of sorts (I blame hormones... or perhaps it is, rather, the lack of them!) and so I decide to cut stuff up and stick it on a page and I feel better. Therapeutic! I also think that because it is play and there are no rules and you can be as messy as you like, and start again if the page looks like utter rubbish, well, it is just so good for you. It's like being a kid and let's face it... we got to do all the cool stuff when we were kids. Why not , now we're ...

An old post

This is a blog I wrote for a now defunct pop culture site I used to contribute to, some years ago.   A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.”   The only Jane Austen I have read is “ Emma .” and it was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets, oh my gosh!) but analysing Emily Dickinson was enough to sap the will to live right out of me. Fortuitously, at the end of that semester, I saw the movie Stargate on TV,  and promptly un-enrolled myself fr...