Dictating a Novel

I'm leaving today for Savannah and Tybee Island to attend a wedding this weekend. This will be a welcome break for me after some reflections during the past few days working from home and being off from work last week for 3 days. I spend those days watching a Korean movie, hiking for nearly 2 hours in the nearby mountains and watching a concert in Athens, Georgia. I'm preparing myself for the common work and I'll be back in the office next week. I feel my usual anxiety for some reason with my new assignments and working in my former platform. Frankly I do not like going back here to my old group having spent most of my career in this area.

I have been doing meditation as well using a device that I recently bought called Luminosity which is a head band that flashes light with synchronized sounds to keep my attention and experience the light and sound from this device. I tried it last night and frankly it helped relieve some of my anxiety. I have tried all sorts of devices such as tDSC, PEMF and other headband devices such as MUSE along with my daily Tai Chi, plus journaling. The recent stress is due to my consuming project of completing my first novel.

I have done a lot of work and progress in my novel by translating my written journals into electronic form, learning new tools like Scrivener which I bought a long way back but have not used, and reading about the ‘Save The Cat’  beat sheets to create a first draft and using AI tools like Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity  to assist me in outlining and structuring the novel. I now have a first draft based on all this work with the assistance of AI tools. I feel slightly uneasy with all the hoopla about using AI for writing. I already tried an AI writing tool called Sudowrite and I did not like the output as it sounded artificial.

Another technique that I'm using is dictation. I've been a Toastmaster for more than 20 years and I've been blog writing for 21 years and journal writing for 43 years. I attended several writing courses plus wrote a few stories and poetry throughout my journaling years. So I'm trying dictation now for storytelling though it does not feel as easy to me as writing down using pen and paper. For my blog I have been typing my posts as well as some journal entries being typed out instead of writing by pen and paper.

Dictating a novel is an entirely different experience and one has to train his mind to adapt to dictation as compared to writing and typing. However, oral storytelling is an ancient tradition prior to the written language. The trick is to prepare for a dictation session by outlining the subject of that session using a template to outline the particular chapter to prepare the mind for dictating. I've been waking up early in the morning to work on my novel for several months now and I think I'm close to a breakthrough with all these innovation.

This is  my retirement life doing  the activity I have been dreaming about for many many years and preparing for most of my life with journaling, blogging, reading books and attending several writing courses and imagining the life of a writer.