I’m beginning to wonder if writing is more the tool of the lazy thinker. Why, you ask? My new phone is giving me an identity crisis. I’ve always thought of writing as one of my strengths, but using the new speech recognition software has me questioning my assumptions. I wanted to test out the speech recognition software by speaking my blog entry instead of writing it. However, I’ve found that composing by speaking is not one of my strong suits. I’ve become very accustomed to the idea of being able to move comments around through cut-and-paste. And now I find it hard to organize my thoughts in a manner that allows me to speak them. In fact I find this torturous. There’s something about having my fingers closet hanging over the keyboard that gives my brain time to think. I don’t even know when to start a new paragraph (had to add this back in — software thought I was telling it to make new paragraph) if I’m talking. This is terrible I’m never speaking another blog again.

Maybe, though, I’m thinking I should do this as an exercise every now and again. The forced nature of having to think out my sentences ahead of time can only improve my writing ability.

If you’re a writer and you have access to voice recognition software, give it a try. I’d love to know if you found it as difficult as I did to compose something by speaking instead of writing.

Some disappointing news today. Rejections are a part of any writer’s life, but sometimes it’s just harder to take than others. Those are the days when you wonder why exactly you keep at it, a tough question to face in the middle of a NaNoWriMo quest. Even tougher when staring down a future full of student loans.

So I guess I’ll just try not to question for now.

My poor little brain will start emitting steam at any moment. First I got a poor night’s sleep and then I needed to drop off the car for service this morning, wrecking my newly established writing schedule. So here I was, late afternoon, with zero words so far on the day and my brain in neutral.

Why neutral? I knew what I wanted to write about, but I couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t decide on an activity that fit the characters, and until I picked the activity, the characters just weren’t coming into focus. I tried napping, hoping that some rest would make me more alert, but I couldn’t sleep knowing how many words I was getting behind in my NaNoWriMo quest. So I took out the laptop and just started writing notes, anything to have words on the page. Then came the silly Google searches. “Rich people hobbies” actually came up as a search term. Who knew?

After much wandering down Internet paths, I found what I was looking for. I researched, took notes and jotted down some specific things for the chapter. Now I’m shutting down the laptop and letting the tired brain do what it does best. Daydream it’s way through.

Less than three hours until our writers’ group meeting — and 300 words to go. All I want to do is nap, but such is life. Today was much harder, as I’m accustomed to doing quite a bit of daydreaming before committing to paper (well, keyboard). No such luxury this month. I’ve been confining my cringing to the shower, where I think of all the revisions I’ll need to do on these lifeless drafts. Did I really just write a chapter with no sense of smell or touch? Did I really develop my new characters so little?

Not my problem. That will be Editor-JoAnn’s task, in December. Mwahaha. Time to get back to my 300 devils.

Of course, I mean “mission accomplished” in the George Bush sense of the phrase. This is only day one of NaNoWriMo, and I was adding on to a draft of a chapter I’d already started (though I didn’t count the already existing text in my word count). Yes, George, this is just the tip of my iceberg of a novel. But if I can’t go grin like a chimp on the deck of a war ship, I can at least brag on my blog. Why? Because it just ups the expectations for me tomorrow. Ha!

And I’ve learned so much already. Eventually I will automatically block out the blaring music at Starbucks, despite having to sit directly under a speaker. Why, oh why, can’t they just have a speaker-free area? I learned that my ability to focus on writing has a shorter life span than my battery, so no need to drag along the power cord if fully charged. The Kitten is learning to curl up behind me rather than on my lap — or on my laptop.

Plus, I nearly had a nervous breakdown when Evernote mysteriously hid all my notebooks. The beat goes on.

And so begins the month for the psychotically optimistic — NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Yes, I’ve signed over my soul. A draft of the sequel in 30 days. Of course, I’ve already been working on the sequel for some time, but the goal here is to write 50,000 words and have an actual rough draft by the end of the month.

On top of that, I’m even going to blog during the trial-by-fire. This month will give me the chance to test out some new gizmos and gimmicks for writers in extremis, and I will bring you the scoop on it all.

The experiment that most excites me (other than the novel writing itself, of course) is trying out the Scrivener software. They have extended their already generous 30-day free trial for NaNoWriMo participants. Scrivener allows me to keep all my chapter and scene drafts together with my research notes and character and location cards. I can even write short synopses for each text and lay them out like cards on a bulletin board or list them for a makeshift outline. It looks like it will be helpful, but the real question is whether I’ll wind up just using it to procrastinate.

I’m also getting used to working daily on a Mac. I’m ditching the old PC, finally, and upgraded from an old Macbook to a Macbook Air. The transfer of files was soul-sucking, given that I’ve been terrible about revisions. I’ve re-edited all my work many, many times — sometimes just a few words here or there — but I’ll be damned if I can remember if I last made changes on the Mac or the PC. Even the file info can’t always help. Ugh.

But now I’m down to one, little itty-bitty computer. I got the 11 inch because I love being able to throw the machine in my purse and go wherever. I first tried a netbook some years back and it was lovely for writing, but it constantly overheated and broke down (Asus EEE). It could also be a little difficult to type on. So far, the Air is a dream. Light, quick, reliable so far, and very easy to use. I’m falling in love with the multitouch gestures (most didn’t work on the old Macbook).

When I first got the Air, I bought Pages, Apple’s word processor, so that I could try using it to sync on the iPhone. But now that I’ve had this machine for a few days, I know I’m never going to do any editing on my phone anymore. This laptop is just to easy to take along with me. Plus, the document syncing for Pages and iCloud doesn’t work quite how I thought it would. I still need to log onto iCloud, even though I originally thought it would simply sync in the way the calendars do. I could use Google Docs for that.

I guess that means I won’t have much to say when my iPhone 4S eventually gets here, since I likely won’t be using it for writing. Maybe the new text recognition will prove a bonus if I happen to get an idea when I’m out and about. It might also serve me well on the blog, since I’ll be able to speak it in if I’m in a jam. More likely, Siri will tempt me with her distractions right in mid-month. Oh, did I mention there’s also a new Sue Grafton novel coming out on November 14th? I’ve been waiting two years for the newest installment — not even NaNo can stop me from reading it. I’ll just have to try to get ahead before then.