Interesting day today. I’ve been spending the majority of it doing the final loop. I call it the final master loop—it’s when I sweep through the chapters and clean them up.
The wonderful thing is that I write pretty clean so I’m not spending very much time per chapter—I do a few chapters, then do something else, then do a few more. Editing brain/fatigue is real. I’m about 43% of the way through the loop and should pass 50% before bed. That leaves me for a clean finish of the loop sometime tomorrow night most likely. Tomorrow is my birthday but I don’t plan to take it off, so I’m going to get this thing done and pushed out to my editor.
For reading and marketing—no work in these areas. Normality will resume later this weekend. The most important thing to do is to get new words in, finish my novel, and put myself in a position to start the next one. My next book will start over the weekend. I will probably PROBABLY probably go into Beast Mode on Sunday.
For data analysis, I came up with another handful of commands to use during my dictation sessions that will make a gigantic difference. Year of the Rat is technically the first novel that I wrote almost exclusive through my voice recorder, and that taught me a lot. I designed some concepts to enhance my dictation macro even more.
Right now, the macro does the following things to help me dictate text that is extremely clean in real-time:
- “Pikachu” command deletes the current sentence. I use this when I make a conscious mistake.
- “Bulbasaur” command is used to delete text that I speak but is not meant for the recording due to an unexpected interruption. I.e. I am dictating and someone rings the doorbell and say “thank you” to the delivery person.
- Italic, bold, and underline commands are pretty self-explanatory.
- Ordered list and bulleted list commands help me create lists while I’m speaking.
- Insert comment command is for reminding myself about something, or to go back and fix something that I messed up earlier.
The next round of enhancements will do the following:
- “Delete previous” command will delete the previous sentence or previous paragraph. Sometimes I speak a sentence and end it with a period. If I do that, my Pikachu command won’t work. This one alone will improve my quality considerably, and it’s already pretty high.
- Proper noun capitalizations. If I speak a proper noun, I can’t be assured Dragon will treat it properly. So, by wrapping text with a command, I can then have the macro capitalize each word within. An example would be COMMAND teenage mutant ninja turtles COMMAND. This would create Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I can hopefully have the macro exclude the words “the”, “of”, “a”, “an”, “on”, etc. This is also a huge enhancement that will make a stupendous difference. I can’t overstate that, actually.
- Find/Replace Array. Dragon just doesn’t do well with proper nouns. I will include a section in the macro that serves as a proper noun library where I can put in the proper nouns of all the characters for the story I’m currently writing. Now, Dragon can also learn vocabulary, and that’s highly accurate. The problem is that sometimes it mishears what you say no matter how hard you try. For example, I have a character named Garamanthus in the novel I wrote. Dragon always reproduces the name differently. Sometimes it’s Garrett Mathis, or care Mathis, or dear Mathis. My goal is to put “Garret Mathis”, “dear Mathis” and “care Mathis” into the library AHEAD OF TIME once I know all the potential variations so that the macro will do a simple find and replace without me having to manually update the name. This way, if Dragon gets the name right, awesome—if it doesn’t, the macro serves as a safety net. When you dictate, you spend so much time cleaning up proper nouns it’s not even funny. This is going to help me fly a lot faster.
Anyhoo, I got the changes off to my developer so I anticipate having the macro updated sometime in the next 2-3 days. This is going to be super helpful for Beast Mode. Once I’ve tested the macro sufficiently, I’ll post examples of some dictated text here so you can see just how clean it will be.
Anyway, that’s how I like to spend my Friday nights. LOL
I did manage to write 600 words toward Indie Author Confidential Vol. 10 today, just so I could have a few words for the day, so that’s a win.
Have a good night.
Words Written This Year: 333,400 / 850,000 Goal
