This has been one solid weekend so far. I didn't share this, but I was traveling for the last three days. I just got back from Chicago. I managed to keep my writing momentum, hitting my minimum quota of 2,750 words every day while I was there, even while I was on the road.
How did I do it?
First, I wrote as many words as I could on Monday through Thursday before I left. By writing more words then I technically needed, that insulated me from any potential misses.
Next, I planned out what I was going to write. Because I knew I was going to be in a travel mindset and therefore pretty preoccupied since I had my family with me, I decided that writing nonfiction would be easier for the three days. Besides, I had chapters to write for Indie Author Confidential Volume 11 , a secret project I am working on, and another miscellaneous nonfiction book I am working on. By focusing almost exclusively on nonfiction, I set myself up for success.
Next, I wrote on my phone as much as I could, but I didn't have much time to do that. I drove most of the way there and most of the way back, so I didn't really have much backseat time. Any backseat time I had went exclusively toward looping a short story I was currently working on.
I also brought my voice recorder and lapel mic with me. The great thing about traveling is that you have a lot of downtime. While my family was resting, I plugged in the voice recorder, paced around the hotel room for an hour, and got words in. On the night we arrived, I managed a one hour dictation session. On day two, I managed one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. On day three, I managed about 45 minutes before hitting the road to return home.
I also used my wife's computer. I don't like to take my MacBook Pro with me when I travel because it's expensive and I'm just paranoid. However, my wife did bring her Windows laptop. Since I almost exclusively use Microsoft Word these days, I was simply able to sync my manuscripts to her computer and use Word to edit one of my short stories. This worked wonderfully.
Now, you're probably thinking: if I didn't bring my MacBook Pro, how did I effectively utilize my voice recorder? After all, if I couldn't transcribe my work, wouldn't that create a bottleneck?
The short answer is yes, I did create some bottlenecks for myself this weekend, but they aren't that big of a deal. First, I saved all of my recordings into a dedicated folder in the cloud so that when I returned home, all I had to do was boot up my computer, and the Dragon Auto Transcribe Agent immediately went to work and had transcribed everything before I even unloaded the car.
Anyway, this was a pretty successful weekend.
In other news, I've got some really exciting things in the hopper that I am excited to announce, hopefully within the next few days. The first is a new project that is almost complete. The second is a project related to dictation that, if successful, will be a game changer and a paradigm shift for many people currently using Dragon. If it's not successful, it will also be very instructive. It's a crazy idea, but I am confident that it will work, and if it does, it will increase my dictation speeds by around 20 to 30 percent and it will also drastically reduce the number of errors that my editor has to correct. As I mentioned frequently, my manuscripts are already quite clean.
And finally, I recommend checking out the kick starter I'm taking part in. It's going to end soon, so if you want an amazing short story anthology from a group of amazing and incredibly talented authors, were coming down to the final stretch. Here's a video I recorded to promote it: https://youtu.be/eHP5W3Mee8g
YTD Word Count: 243,050
Plan: 1,252,000
Words Left to Write 1,008,950
Words Over/-Under Plan: 12,050
Days Ahead/-Behind: 4.38
Projected Annual Word Count: 1,056,110
Projected Decade Word Count: 10,561,101
Deadline: 12/31/2023
Days to Go Until 12/31/23: 407
Word Count Average: 2,893
