I had a knockout day today. Absolutely stunning. Numbers down below as well as the first Beast Mode Poll to vote on my next book I’ll write during the challenge.
For reading, I continued Vol. 7 of IDW’s TMNT. Still loving it so far.
For data analysis, I sketched out some additional capabilities for my dictation macro. This will continue to be important until I can exhaust all of my avenues. Every enhancement I make will improve the accuracy and cleanliness of my dictated text, which is already outstanding.
I also tweaked some settings on my voice recorder at the recommendation of Scott Baker’s great book on Dragon and dictation. This made a noticeable difference in the quality of my transcription. Before, I would say the transcription was batting around a 97% accuracy. Now, it’s about 98%. One percent makes a gigantic difference when you’re this high.
Most importantly, the setting tweaks made a huge difference with the lapel microphone that I use with the voice recorder when driving or dictating in public. I only have one session worth of data from today, but early indications are that I may have boosted the accuracy of my transcription while driving by about 10%. That means my lapel mic results are almost on-par with my voice recorder, but it’s too early to tell for sure.
If anyone’s interested, the settings I tweaked had to do with the microphone sensitivity and “low cut” settings. Big difference.
I also noticed that Dragon recognizes my special dictation commands a little better with these setting tweaks. Especially my “Bulbasaurs.” That’s positive.
For marketing, I signed off on the sketch for the illustrated cover of Year of the Rat. The designer did a great job with my feedback and is off to the races now. The next step is to receive a colored version.
For production, I wrote a whopping 8400 words today. And I’m still not done because there are dishes in the sink…………
I did the trick I discovered yesterday…I walked around my office and dictated for an hour straight. That resulted in approximately 3,300 clean words. Pretty cool. I’m starting to get the hang of this method and I’m flying now. Overall, I dictated for about 2.5 hours today. 1 hour before work, 1 hour after work, and about 30 minutes in the car. I’ll probably do 30 minutes more at the sink.
To be fair, nonfiction is a lot easier to dictate. But comfort and improved macros are going to translate into my fiction in the short term as well.
Anyway, because I had a way better day than expected, I am likely going to finish Indie Author Confidential Vol. 10 tomorrow or Saturday morning. It’s time to vote on my next book here: https://forms.gle/uhnbjjqMkamEPT8z9
The choices are:
* The Good Necromancer Book 6 (Novel)
* The Good Necromancer Short Story Collection (About 10 short stories)
* A book on R.A.M.P. (not sure what this will ultimately be yet so it could evolve)
* A book on author marketing basics
Voting ends Saturday night, so vote now!
Have a good night.
Words Written This Year: 358,300 / 850,000 Goal
