5,100 words today (!!)
I prepped for my new challenge today. This coming week will be the last week of Amnesia Mode.
My back is feeling better so I had what the hell, why not explore what my “writing while moving challenge” would look like.
I loaded up Dragon (for Windows) on my computer, and it runs great. No issues at all running it on a virtual machine on my Mac.
I have a microphone boom arm that I haven’t been using, so I broke it out and attached it to my bike desk. I put my Blue Yeti on it. Then, I put my laptop on the desk. And voila! I was ready to start dictating while moving:
I climbed on the bike and dictated a few test paragraphs, and I’ve still got it—super smooth and clean. Not 100% perfect, but most of it was due to Dragon not understanding some proper nouns. That’s a constant battle, but not insurmountable in the long term.
After testing everything, I launched into dictating the next few chapters of Indie Author Confidential, Volume 4 just to see what would happen. In 30 minutes, I dictated 1500 words, which is about 50 words per minute. That’s slow. For comparison, the average person types around 40 words per minute. I type around 100 when I’m on fire. So my dictation isn’t much faster than my typing right now, but that’ll improve with time.
The chapters I wrote, I wrote in one draft with minimal edits. They were mostly clean. But this is nonfiction, so it’s not 100% indicative of how my fiction will turn out.
Someone asked about how to write clean yesterday, so let me describe how I did it:
#0: Don’t use Dragon for Mac.
#1: Speak slowly and clearly to improve your diction so Dragon can understand you better.
#2: Teach Dragon your proper nouns as early as possible to improve your accuracy.
#3: Whenever Dragon makes a mistake, stop immediately and fix it. No exceptions. Writing sloppy is an invitation for frustration in editing. First, try to fix it with your voice by using commands. If that doesn’t work, then use your hands. But only use your hands when absolutely necessary. I only had to correct a few words here and there, maybe 20-30 total out of 1500. This slows you down tremendously, but it’s far better to fix it in the moment so you don’t have to worry about it later. Also, you tend to speak in a more consistent manner than when you’re typing, so even if you speak at the same rate that you type, your session word counts will still be fatter because once you get comfortable, you won’t start/stop nearly as much as when you type. Keep in mind that I learned to do this on the Mac version of Dragon which is buggy as hell.
#4: For errors that Dragon keeps repeating, use Microsoft Word macros to find/replace those words after you’re done dictating. For example, Dragon just can’t learn “Author Level Up.” It usually spells “Author level up” or “Author level Up.” I can fix this via macro. The nice part about Dragon is that it doesn’t make spelling errors very often except for the occasional there/their and other homophones.
#5: Patience. You have to relearn how to speak and how to tell a story. It feels unnatural to say periods, exclamation points and such, but you get used to it. I internalized it, so much that it came back pretty quickly.
Anyway, I’ll probably keep practicing for the next few days as I decide what I want to write. The words on my bike will be a brand new urban fantasy series. I’ll write my existing The Good Necromancer off the bike.
Also, being on the bike definitely helped my back, so I’m definitely on the mend now.
I wrote 1500 words with dictation, and 3600 typing. So overall, a KILLER word count day.
At my current pace, if I’m on the bike for 60 minutes per day, I’ll write 3000 words. That would net me 21,000 words per week, which would get me a finished novel in 2 weeks, and 2 novels in one month. Add in typing words and words from my phone, and I’ll probably be in the ballpark of around 4000-7000 words total per day, which would make my Beast Mode word counts look like warm-ups.
Just for fun, if I wrote an average 5000 words per day for a year, that would net me at least 1.8 million words, or 36 novels per year. That’s pulp writer territory. WOWZA!!! This is what Dean Wesley Smith calls Pulp Speed Five. Read his article about pulp speed writing here: https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/the-new-world-of-writing-pulp-speed/
What if you did that every year for a decade? After just a few years alone, you’d easily be in the top 1% of writers who ever lived in terms of words published. You might even be in the top 0.01%, who knows.
Anyway, I still need to talk about ads!
LESSON LEARNED AND EXECUTED
Solid ad day today. I’m poised to make a good profit, which I’ll take for a Friday night. My conversion rate was around 4-5 all day, which is always a good sign when you’re in that position around dinner time.
I also sold another poetry collection and short story collection today. It’s eery how I can predict when they’ll sell. Math is cool like that, I suppose.
I put a spending cap on my short story collection so it’s done for the month. I’m only going to lose a couple dollars overall on it, which is not bad. My other ads can easily subsidize a few bucks. Small price to pay for selling a few copies. I’ll continue to work on ways to make it more profitable next month.
Anyhoo, that’s a lot of excitement for a Friday night. Hope everybody has a great weekend.
