I am the tortoise. Koo koo kachoo.
969 words. That was what I wrote last night. Not even 1000. Could’ve been worse but I feel like it should have been better. At least it wasn’t zero. At this rate, I’ll finish this draft close to the end of May.
But, I will finish.
I am feeling the character. Vincent Solomon is finding his voice. Even better, I think I’m transitioning to being more comfortable with dictation than typing. It has been a long, hard battle. But, I think it is the reason I’m able to find Vincent’s voice.
I might be more of a method actor writer than I realized.
It confuses my Dragon Dictation though. It is hard to train the software to recognize my normal speaking voice and when I am doing voices. Especially when I am doing a bad fake accent.
And trust me, all of my fake accents are bad.
The experience is a little weird for me. If there was one thing I wish Dragon could do, it would be adjusting the italics and font weight of certain words based on how I pronounce them. That is the future of robot typing machines. This tool will not be perfect until it can emphasize the same words I do just by listening to me say them.
I have also changed everything about my writing set-up. I have a microphone attached to a dinner tray in my living room so I can move it around. Sometimes I lay flat on my back and let the microphone hang over me and sometimes I have to flip it up the other direction so I can pace around it in a little half circle.
I was trying to use a Bluetooth headset so I could paste all the way back and forth across my apartment, but it wasn’t working well.
Everything is going very slow, but it is going.
I am about 10% of the way through this draft. I’m just now finding the story’s voice, so the next draft will take work. It’s a slog, but I don’t have any better ideas right now.
I keep getting distracted by the rest of my life. Not to make excuses. I need to be more aware of my tendency to procrastinate.
I was spending a significant amount of time playing a game on my phone and I deleted that. Makes me a little sad, because it was Tap for Katamari, and everyone knows Katamari Damacy is the greatest video game ever invented by mankind. I spent way too much time playing.
Which means I can add it to the list with Zuma Blitz, Candy Crush, and World of Warcraft.
Video games are a massive distraction for me. I can’t even let myself use them as a treat.
It was the right choice for me. I have been more productive both in my writing and other aspects of my life since I uninstalled them for my phone.
These are the sacrifices I make for you. Sacrifices I will happily stop making once we have cloning technology and I win a battle royale against 40 copies of myself to determine which one is the Matt-Prime. All other Matt’s will the be forced to do my bidding.
Until then, I will continue to chip away at the walls of the word mines. Should fortune shine on me, I will strike a meaty vein of imaginative ore, deep and rich enough to sustain us all for the rest of eternity.
Otherwise I might run out of excuses.