What do you guys think?

Howdy!

Well, I’m having fun. Hope you are too. And yes, I’m dictating this. Again.

And that’s not my only current misadventure. I’ve raised my desk 10 inches, and shoved a semi-recumbent exercise bike under it in lieu of a chair. I’m pedaling right now. Or, well, at least I was pedaling when I “wrote” this. I don’t really know what I’ll be doing when you read this, if you do.

But the main thing? If I have an outline–meaning: if I do something I’ve never really liked to do–it turns out I can sometimes dictate new fiction fairly quickly. As in…about twice as fast as I can type it, or 60wpm (yeah, that’s actually my standard typing speed, but not while composing). Which is really cool, but getting the outline ready slows me down far more than the increased speed is worth. At least for now.

So here are the options, as I see them at the moment:

• Learn to love outlining, at least a few scenes at a time, and write from the outlines I produce
• Give up on dictation
• Keep working on this, and see what next week brings

The bicycle thing isn’t giving me any trouble, for which I’m grateful. And I’ve successfully managed dictation while pacing, too. It’s but a short step–pun most likely intended–to doing it outside. Within a quarter-mile of my condo, I can be hiking on reasonably remote trails, right here on Douglas Island. Kind of looking forward to that.

IOW, I still don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe it’s just foolish for me to be trying to make dictation work at this point. But…it’s going so much better now than it was a couple of weeks ago. I do want to write a blog post about the limitations of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12, and their horrible customer-service department, at some point–but not today. (Short version: it’s a  plain-text generator that crashes, nothing more, and striving for anything more than that leads only to frustration. Plus they’re jerks via email.)

Today? I’m going to work on an outline. And see what happens.

Plus, I’ll be helping a kid with homework pretty soon. And doing some hiking with that kid. And smoking some pork, and having people over later. A typical Saturday. Lately.

So, no crises here. Just…noticing that my word-count would’ve been much higher if I hadn’t started messing around. Any of you guys have suggestions or advice for me? I’m listening.