Embroidery and Dragon Naturally Speaking.

[watervole]

Today has been a fairly productive kind of day. I've started teaching myself how to use Excel and have managed the first two lessons from a course that I found on the website. My aim is to do a lesson a day for the next few days. I want to gain at least a basic familiarity with Excel as I'm treasurer for Redemption '09 and I'd also like to use Excel for keeping track of stories that I submit.

I completed a blue tit embroidered bookmark that I've been working on for some time. The trouble with completing a really nice piece of embroidery is that you hate to spoil it by actually using it...

I got out a story that I wrote several years ago, that was originally accepted for an anthology that never made it into print, and decided to try sending it somewhere else. However, as I started reading through it to make sure that the format was correct, I realised that I've learnt a lot about writing since the time when I originally wrote it. It's now getting some serious editing. Looking on the bright side, at least I have a sample text for the Redemption editing workshop if no one else brings along a suitable story.

I'm also getting faster using Dragon. I'm still having to correct a moderate amount of what I'm typing, but I'm getting faster at handling the corrections, and as Dragon gets more used to my speech the recognition rate improves. The important thing is to correct errors using Dragon rather than typing the corrections manually. Dragon learns through the corrections I make.

I'm also going to have some fun ensuring that Dragon knows suitable phrases such as Captain Jack Harkness, which it got right first try! Let's see how it manages with Torchwood... no, I had to correct that one. Let's try to it on Ianto -- it got Ianto correct. Toshiko? -- yes (but then I did teach it those the other day).

How is it on Stargate? Very good so far. Colonel O'Neill, Samantha Carter, Teal'c -- I had to tell it there were two L's in O'Neill and it struggled with Teal'c.

I've still got things to learn with this new version of Dragon, but it's certainly helping reduce the workload on my wrists already.

Comments

[aeshna_uk]

Oh good, more workshops at Redemption. Those are always fun, although the whole tarot thing has proved to be entirely TOO effective at bunny creation, I've found.... ;)

Nice to see someone else looking at writing Torchwood fic! :D

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

Excel, for keeping track of stories?

[watervole.livejournal.com]

What market they are submitted to, the expected response time, date of submission, whether they take electronic subs, date of response, nature of response, rate of pay per word, and a few other bits as well.