Friday, November 09, 2007

Nano progress days 7, 8 and 9

Wrote 1100 words on the 7th, 1000 yesterday and 550 so far today (although it's only 1pm.)

I'm hoping to do another 2000 today - enough's enough, and it's time to knuckle down and get ahead. I have a very busy weekend coming up and my publisher is posting back the page proofs of Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch for me to go over early next week, so I can't afford to let things slide.

Yesterday I designed & coded myself a little text editor which allows me to set a word count (e.g. 500) so that it can maintain a 'words left' count in the status bar as I type. I finished writing undo/redo and auto backup code for it today, and the 550 words was my first effort with it.

Oh, and today I also used Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate the words. I think much faster than I type, which means I usually edit on the fly, rewording the next sentence in my head while I'm still typing the previous one. (I type about 60 wpm.) Throw in plotting and character creation on the run and you can see why I don't like distractions when I'm working.

Anyway, Dragon is okay but somewhat CPU intensive, and it lags a fair bit on my laptop. The desktop has a dual CPU and power to spare, but I can't dictate on that because we have an open plan house - too much ambient noise.

The other problem with Dragon is punctuation, especially in dialogue. I've decided to plough on without it, and I'll correct it later. (And correcting misinterpreted words is another whole ball o' fun.)

How's everyone else doing with their Nano efforts? Ahead? Behind? Anyone else using speech-to-text?

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series (Amazon / Smashwords / other formats)

1 comment:

WordVixen said...

Way, way behind. But, I never actually said that I was doing NaNo.