Life, Writing, Weirdness

There have been a few small technological advances since my last big run at dictation, and a bit of time has passed since then due to COVID and school. I’m actually not sure why I didn’t try to do more dictation in the car during the period when I was going back and forth to school by myself as much as five days a week. I would have had all of first and second year to do so, and big chunks of third year. During my third year, Melanie was only coming in once or twice a week for the bridge program. It wasn’t until fourth year that she was coming in daily for the pre-health program. This year, my oldest child also joined us most days as he returned to school for a new program to put him on a new career path. When I had the thought here and there, dictation seemed like an impossibility.

This summer is a bit different, though. The giant Trump-led cluster-fuck in the Middle East, in addition to killing (tens of?) thousands of people, has add about 50% to the price per liter of fuel. I’m not going into campus more than I have to. Twice a week at most and only once if I can get away with it.

When I do go in, I’m mostly driving by myself. And it occurred to me on one of those early trips in that it might be a good opportunity to push ahead on the first draft of a couple of things on the non-fiction side. When I look back at this month’s production, it will be easy to tell which days I got some substantial dictation in. All I’ll have to do is look at the word count.

Assuming I get all the writing time in that I want to right now, I have two types of typical day. A workday, which are mostly weekdays. We’ll have somewhere between 1,300 and 1,500 words most of the time. Ideally, 1000-ish of that is drafting fiction, and 300 or so is working on the Memory Project in the background. I’m also trying to find a little bit of time each day to do a bit of fiction editing, not that I’m always successful (which is fine since I’m supposed to be trying to focus on one big project at a time). Because I track editing by net word change, it doesn’t necessarily add much to the total anyway. Things will also change substantially when I do finally manage to get to the end of the seemingly ever-expanding superhero novel I’m working on. Probably sometime in July at this point. When that happens, I will switch over to some heavy editing for a little while to get The Hauntings of Fiona to second draft and then Welkiri Corps to final before switching back to drafting again.

Weekends are a bit different. My typical day usually winds up being somewhere between 2000 and 2500 words at the moment. In addition to the normal weekday totals, I’m also looking to put in 500 or 1000 words into a shorter fiction project, either the complete first draft of a flash story or as close to 1000 words as I can manage into a short story or novelette.

That’s all if I get the amount of writing time I want, of course, and I do have two more academic trips coming up this summer, plus a week’s vacation, where my production will be way down. I will have a computer with me for all of those, so I will probably get a few words a day in. But right now, ignoring what day of the week it is, I should be hitting somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 words most of the time. On a dictation day, and I expect to have a limited number of those most of the time (usually one per week, sometimes two), that number seems to be spiking to 5,000 or more.

Which is cool. It’s going to put a substantial boost into the annual total for 2026 (probably somewhere between 60 and 80,000 words overall), which is nice. More importantly, it means I’m currently making better progress on the volume of the Memory Project that I’m supposed to be drafting this year. Volume 4, which covers the time between when I finished with school the first time to the night of my oldest child’s birth. Tentatively subtitled On Our Own. Add to that the ability to produce more blog posts and the summer months may be a little more populated on my blog than they were otherwise, and probably more than they will be come September.

Dictation is in fact how this post was initially drafted. Slowly dictating word by word or sentence by sentence to get the basic thoughts down.

And I say slowly, but that can be 50-65 words per minute, so at the low end assuming 35 minutes worth of dictation time each direction, a commuting day nets at least 3500 extra words that day, and usually more than 4000. Anything I do produce this way does need a second pass, of course. But almost everything I write, even in a non-fiction vein, is going to get a second pass (and third) eventually anyway. I don’t treat it that much differently than fiction.

You will note that I specifically talked about non-fiction for dictation. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stay there. I just haven’t, at least the time of drafting this post, tried to dictate fiction again. Historically, sometimes that works very, very well for me. And sometimes it feels like I’m trying to pull every single word from the jaws of writer’s block. That round-trip commute might get 4000 words for something but it might also only get 1000. Working on non-fiction out loud nearly always goes well. So, we’ll see.

I think I also mentioned the idea that there had been some technological advances. And I don’t want to suggest that this is AI actually doing something good in the background. Although it may very well be considering how nearly every for-profit company in existence is trying to shoehorn it into everything it makes. I used to rely on Dragon Naturally Speaking, which was early machine learning (not the same as an LLM), I think, that you had to train to your voice and your cadences so that it would get more and more accurate. I still have that software kicking around somewhere, although my version of it is 10 years old or more. These days there are online services who will do the work similarly, although usually they want it in smaller chunks to remain free. And I’m not super keen on uploading things like that.

I’m also not as keen as I might be on the way that I’m actually doing it. Which is related to another small technological advance.

Microsoft Word has had the ability to take dictation for quite some time. And I have made use of that now and then. I recently discovered, though, that it now has the option to upload an audio file and transcribe that for you. And it’s far quicker than Dragon Naturally Speaking ever was when I was using it. A half hour worth of dictated audio is usually done in four or five minutes so far on my laptop. It also seems to be far more accurate, something over 99%.

This does slightly put me at odds with my current efforts to slowly divorce myself from US big tech for anything where my work doesn’t require it. The next step was going to be a suitable non-US, non-commercial replacement for Office (and I have candidates in mind). I won’t ever lose access to Office because my wife has it for work and I basically just tag on to her account, but I will have to look into if there are other office packages where the word processor does the same thing. I will also need to consider where to go from there if they don’t? Because this is super convenient. Of course, that’s how they get you.

I also really haven’t done a big search yet for open source software that does the same thing, whether that’s in Windows or Linux, which I’m considering switching to.

More on that another time, I think. But for now, let’s just say I’m very happy with the increased word counts I’m experiencing. And that I’m starting to consider switching some of that time into fiction as well.

Be well, everyone.