November Reader Update
“I understand there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke week all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of statagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.” – Anthony Bourdain
There’s an old writing chestnut that says “write every day.” If you accept this mentality as a writer, it’s supposed to make it easier to sit at the keyboard and hit your word count, supposedly. So here I am writing in the living room because my office has the stench of procrastination about it. If I sit at my desk, I check Slack to talk smart and make pithy comments, then I check the news, email, the calendar and about the time I decide to finally click over to my story, I get the hankering for a coffee, or a snack, or maybe start a load of laundry, or any old thing that will only take a minute. This is what’s known as “The Resistance.” It comes in more insidious forms: the productivity hack, researching new methods of cranking some widget faster or making the story outline more granular so the words will just flow when you’re actually doing that thing you need to do, but you don’t wanna.
So like Anothony Bourdain, I’m coming up with strategies for outsmarting my inner couch potato. Right now, I am writing on my dumb terminal, an AlphaSmart Neo 2, little more than a keyboard and whose four-line LCD display that can hold about two sentences at a time. I can only see the recent past and therefore don’t feel the need to go back and edit or see what I’ve been babbling about. (And I do babble, now that it’s editing time and … yeesh!) It’s a strategy that worked today. Tomorrow it will lose a little effectiveness, a little more the day after that, and so on until I’ll have to find something else to silence the monkey brain with something novel so I can work on my novel.
Speaking of, Book 3 is chugging along, a page or two every day. I’ve been experimenting with voice dictation on the phone with mixed results. On the one hand, I can get about 1300 words in 30 minutes even with my halting, self-conscious, repeating self. If it were perfect copy, that would work out to five whole paperback-sized pages. In theory, I could finish a 300-page manuscript in less than a week! But on the other hand, this copy is the worst kind of copy, messy and encrypted in my own mental shorthand. It turns out that I need three times as much editing time to fix the dictation as the original recording session. For one, the voice-to-text function on the iPhone is slow since it can only process the recording in real-time. So my 30 minute recording session takes 30 minutes of processing during which the phone can do nothing else. Then there’s autocorrect, which sometimes decides that the word it hears doesn’t make sense (even though it does in the context of the story) and so replaces whole lines with grammatically correct jibberish. Finally there’s the in-between work of changing a spoken sentence into a written one, by which I mean that writing is more concise than speech, and in going over my dictation copy, my brain comes up with better words, snazzier dialogue, or little bits of description that I pictured but literally didn’t give voice to.
In the end, I average slightly more words per minute dictating a story draft than typing, and that’s only with minimal exercise. My peers who have converted to the Church of Dictation assure me that it will get better. But man, is it painful right now.
I’m cutting out the funny links in this newsletter and changing the name to make it more palatable to a leery reader who unlike you fine people, aren’t ready to give me the benefit of the doubt. The newsletter mailing list is now Wade Peterson’s Author Reader Group ™ and a fine club it is! The links are going away because while they’re amusing, they also make your email provider’s anti-spam filters nervous, which can affect this email’s deliverability. If your email program has separate places for regular mail, social media, or promotions, you might already know what I mean. I want this to show up in your regular mail and not lumped in with the Bed Bath and Beyond flyer or worse, the spam folder. I’ll be moving the funny stuff to the other social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Where it all ends up is still a work in progress but I think most of the linked material will show up on my Facebook Author page. The social media strategy will be covered in another post, where I’ll explain how I’m going to interact with each platform, and how best to interact with me. If you’ve been following me at the above haunts, you’ll have already gotten a taste of how it will likely go: Facebook for most of the content and reposts to Twitter and Instagram.
