Updates: Just a Couple Things

So, I know that the chapters have been light recently. Some of it was just me coming off the writer's retreat. It was good in most respects. I got a break from being at home. I learned some stuff. I saw some people I hadn't seen in a while, and I met a few interesting new people. But, it was a lot of socializing, and I'm very introverted. Spending time with groups of people is very emotionally draining for me.

Also, travel tends to kick off migraines for me. Probably something to do with stress and exposure to stuff in the air that I'm not normally exposed to. The takeaway is that last week was mostly me trying to recover from lots of socializing and enduring a higher than average number of migraines for me. I basically did nothing but sleep, migraine, and listen to audiobooks this last weekend.

The other thing that has been occupying my mind this last week is the prospect of trying out dictation for writing. Up until now, I've been a 100% type-the-book guy. There's nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. Do that long enough, though, and there's a good chance that you will develop a repetitive strain injury like carpal tunnel. Once you get that, you're not doing any typing for quite a while. So, I've been doing background stuff like getting the right software and subscriptions, and playing around with them a little bit.

There are some benefits to speaking your book, and then converting it to text. The biggest one is that, if you can make the transition, it tends to be faster. In some cases, it's a lot faster. Case in point, Seth Ring uses dictation. If you guys think I'm productive, check out that guy's output over the last year or two. I think he's released like 10 or 12 books. It's madness.

Why is it faster? As a general rule, people can speak a lot faster than they type. The average speed of talking is around 130 words per minute. Average typing speed is something like 40 words per minute. Now, I'm a touch typist and very experienced, so I might be in the high end of 70+ words per minute. Even so, that's a 50 word per minute difference. So, lets say that I talk for an hour. At the end of that hour, I will theoretically average 3000 words more than I would if I typed for an hour solid.

Now, that is all after you're up and running, though. At the moment, I'm not confident enough with the idea/process to use it on anything that's currently under contract. Like anything else, there's a learning curve to deal with.

I've also been toying with the idea of writing something that I've plotted pretty rigorously. Not quite as tightly plotted as a Jim Butcher novel (that guy plots everything down to the scene), but more tightly plotted than my usual plotting which looks like this:

1. Introduce character and/or problem

2. Things happen here

3. Assume that I can write a coherent conclusion when I get there

Granted, I've been doing okay with this approach, but there is an argument to be made that it might go faster if I always knew what was happening next.

So, this is what will be happening during my off hours. I will be plotting out a standalone cultivation novel tentatively called Shadow Rises. I needed to call it something, and I like that name. It sounds kind of ominous and verges almost into melodrama without actually crossing the line into melodrama...I think. Once I've got it plotted, I will be using that as my practice book for dictating a book. Also, this book will be aimed at a more trad publishing audience for...reasons that I won't go into right now.

The good news is that nobody is waiting for this book. So, if it takes me three months to get it done, no harm, no foul. I expect that I will share the chapters as I dictate/convert them. I'll definitely want feedback on these chapters to let me know if they don't feel "eric" enough. That's one of my biggest concerns. That this change in approach will mess with the magic somehow.

Now, the big tradeoff with dictating books is that there's more editing involved. That eats into some of the time I'd save on typing. I'm hoping that I'll get proficient enough with it that I can boost my overall speed from start to completion on any given book by about 20-25 percent. If I can speed it up more than that without losing quality, all the better, but that's what I'm aiming to have happen. So, for anybody who has been wondering what eats up my brain capacity, this is what I've been thinking about.