Update and Dragon Naturally Speaking

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to give a short post today to let all of you know that for the first time I am trying Dragon's Naturally Speaking software. This is very new for me and this may be very awkward and take some time to get it together. I'm finding that what I need to do is to retrain my brain to have a complete sentence ahead of time before I speak it, otherwise what comes out on screen is not very good in either spelling or grammar, or word recognition. I just said the word "text is" and what came out was "taxes". I have said plenty of things that are also screwing up as well, but I won't get into those now. Suffice it to say that Dragon's Naturally Speaking software does not recognize CODA speak.

My goal for using the software is to help me write future e-books. Currently I am working on a novel about my life as a CODA. What I found so far in my writing process is that my typing is horrible. I am a very slow at this and my brain processes ideas faster than my fingers can type. The end result is that by the time my typing catches up to where my brain is, I've either lost a good portion of, or the entire idea completely. So hopefully this software will help me to be able to get my ideas on screen quicker, and therefore I can retain most of my ideas before I lose them.

So far this is still going slow, but it still faster than I can type so it's already a plus. I am very confident that as I continue to use the software I will be able to speak more smoothly and quickly, which will leave me with some minor editing to do after I'm done speaking. I am already noticing that the software is picking up my accent a little more clearly the more I speak, so hopefully this will make a big improvement in this process as well.

For those of you who do write and do not have this software, I suggest finding a copy of it and giving it a try. So far I am having fun with this new software and I expect it to be a big help to me in the future. Hopefully this will translate into possibly having more frequent posts on this blog. Even if it doesn't I should still get these things done quicker, and that's a huge plus for me. So here's to hoping that I will be writing more efficiently and more quickly. It's given me my first good feeling in quite some time that the CODA novel will be ready and published much more soon than I have been recently expecting it to be.

More book reviews soon become as tomorrow is the Global E-Books Awards ceremony in Santa Barbara, California. This means that I can post reviews of all the e-books I read and judged for the GEAs. I believe there were eight of them, and I plan is to post one e-book review per week. So that will be a good two-month stretch, if not a little more when you factor in books I'm currently reading. I am looking forward to being much more productive over the next few months. Hopefully you readers will be seeing that as well.

Until next time,

R. M.