That Frog Wasn't So Bad

I lived up to my challenge that I gave myself last night. I got up this morning, and did my writing as the very first thing. I thought back to the days of writing I did last summer, and decided to go for a walk and dictate the story while I went. As usual, it worked great and killed two birds with one stone. I got exercise and writing done at the same time. I finished up my walk with 851 words added to my book.

Dictation can be a little funny, though. Let me add in some of the silly misinterpretations that the phone made from my words:

Before she managed to finish packing away all her camera equipment, Heidi and another serpent arrived to help her carry it.

That should be a servant, not a serpent. I have no idea how a serpent could help you carry anything. They don't even have arms.

then, no well spent the rest of the afternoon in her room, working on editing down the interview.

Then is lower case, even though it starts a sentence. No idea why that would be. Of course, having the name 'Noelle' converted into 'no well' is probably the more egregious error in this.

When 6:00 PM came, she closed down her editing software, went to the closet, and squeezed into her skin, tight jeans and sweater.

I checked, and according to the oxford dictionary, the proper way to say skintight is as a compound word. There's not even a dash between the two parts of the word like you sometimes get. There's definitely not supposed to be a comma and a space in the middle of it.

The tight sweater was drawing Jurgens I, but would eating this much, turn it away?

I think that might be the wrong homophone there. Also, there's only one Jurgen. That should probably have an apostrophe in it instead. And why the extra comma between much and turn?

She - through the door, that Klaus, the chef, had disappeared into after leaving them with their food.

This one might be hard to figure out. What I said was "She dashed through the door that Klaus, the chef, had disappeared into after leaving them with their food," but when you're dictating, there are certain things that are punctuation. I'm not sure how you would say a sentence like, "It had been a long period of strife in his country," because the phone would just turn the word period into the punctuation mark. "It had been a long . Of strife in his country." Also, it added an extra unnecessary comma after the word door.

Anyway, I suppose that's enough. Here's my chart for today:

I'm over my goal for the month now!

15310 / 15000 (102.07%)

102% of my goal! Hurray! I guess I'm going to up my goal to 20,000 and see if I can't reach that before the month is out. I bet I can. I easily managed it on my 500 words a day month in 2022.

In fact, I made it all the way to 25,000. Of course, that was my second month of the process, not my first. So, I'm still going to finish out ahead of myself from last year. In my just-write-every-day month last year, I only got 17,540.

I think I'll crush that. In fact, I have to crush that, because 500 words a day times 9 days makes 4,500 words.

My year-to-date chart looks like this:

Nothing amazing, since it only adds 2,372 words to my total, bringing it to 17,682. But I did bring my average for the month back up to 729. If I keep kicking butt, I might get it above 750.

17682 / 304475 (5.81%)

Still not out of the 5% level yet, but I'll get there.

The interesting thing is that it's only 10:00 AM. I usually write much later than this. I could still put in more time writing later if I find that I have the time. So, it's possible that I'll have to adjust all these numbers up a little bit. If so, I'll mention it in tomorrow's post, though. I'm not gonna rewrite this post later. Forget it.