louiselux | Hangover of blehhh

We went round to a friend's house for dinner last night and I do believe that afterwards we drank a whole bottle of whiskey between us. Oh how I suffer now. The tea is helping a little though. And the sun is shining and birds are bouncing around in the garden so that makes me feel nice. I have some frilly pink tulips this year and they have come out.

Some announcements:

daegaer- sorry to be so slow on the beta. I will have something for you by tomorrow evening. Also, I wish I had your magical resistance to hangovers.

emungere, you can keep the copy of The Virtu I sent, because I was unable to resist buying another copy yesterday and rereading. Mildmay is so fabulous. *paws teh book*

toscas_kiss, no worries about the arrangement last week, because I had forgotten it too! Behold the power of my brain.

The spring kinks are going okay. By which I mean am writing the first one and it is totally running away with me. A dead cow features prominently.

I'm experimenting with a new methodof writing: writing it by hand and then dictating it into a voice recognition programme, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It's accuracy seems good, even now when I've hardly trained it. Except that Gojyo still tends to come out as 'got you' and Hakkai as 'I can'.

So, the speaking is fine. The writing is harder, because if I want to change or add to the handwritten stuff I have to compose sentences in my head. I don't know if other people write like that, but the physical act of writing is somehow important in channeling my ideas and using my voice instead is very odd.

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I can write with a mental 'voice', if that makes sense. I've been doing that since I was a small child - lying in bed, getting myself to drift off to sleep by writing a story in my head. I guess it is the same voice I listen to or use when I'm sitting at a keyboard and typing. I can mentally revise in my head to some extent - not very well as it all flows and I lose the sentence construction quite rapidly, if not the actual story threads. To be able to truly edit/polish, I need it on a screen now. Im my teens I was a pen and paper writer and I can recall a time when I couldn't imagine not writing that way - even when computers became available. I think that was more about my (then) slow typing speed than anything else. If my memory is correct, I rarely edited or changed anything I wrote then. I polish a lot more now and love the fluidity of editing as I go. I'm not at all good at making up a story on the fly and telling it out loud. Typing/writing doesn't interfere with that mental voice but speaking sure as hell does. I think I listen to what I'm saying and lose the inner voice straight away.

That mental voice thing sounds pretty much what I do, too. I twirl and twist ideas and sentences in my head, and when something interesting appears I need to write it down quickly before it runs away. Writing or typing doesn't interfere with it much if I'm really quick about it, but trying to say it out loud blows it all away. (Especially when I'm thinking in English, which I often am, since speaking it is always a bit of a challenge. I have no idea how much of this applies to writing in Finnish, because I haven't done that in ages despite it being my mother tongue.)

Fluidity of editing...

Yes, that's what I love about word processing too. Pen and paper writing feels very clunky now, because of that. I remember a time too when I couldn't imagine writing on a computer, but now I far prefer it.

Maybe practising telling stories aloud would be a good thing to do - it's what humans used to do after all, to entertain themselves, and I've always thought it would be an awesome skill to have, just to reel off a story and keep an audience enthralled. Maybe there'd be a greater link between inner voice and speaking voice then?

Maybe practising telling stories aloud would be a good thing to do

Oh yes - I imagine I'll be getting a whole heap better at it, since I've started telling my (mot yet one-year-old) little one stories. Some times my garbled version of fairy tales I half recall, some times the story of our day and some times something I'm trying to imagine on the fly. I'd really like to be able to spell-bind him that way. he loves me reading/talking to him and if I can create a magical world with just my voice, then I have portable entertainment for his entire childhood.

I'm not great at it so far but I'll keep trying. I learned how to continuously sing songs to him whilst simultaneously changing nappies/dressing him/spooning food into his mouth - the amount of brain I devote to recalling lyrics or making them up (I frequently do the latter but still have standards about sense and rhyming) has shrunk, due to the multi-tasking. Much the same set of skills.

*sends you magic hangover-resistance* (Though I manage to wake up with splitting headaches *without* consuming booze, which is no doubt some sort of cosmic justice). Keep up the tea and tulips, and I hope you feel better soon! Whiskey is evil. Evil!

I need a pen or a keyboard to think! I think I keep my writer!brain in my writing hand.

Yeah, me to, to a large extent, except for the part where I can see the story play out in my head as a film strip. I am not just talking about porn!!1

But, I had a really nice thought - it would be good to practice making up and telling stories aloud, because then I wonder if your writer!brain would move to your vocal chords or more into your head?

Ah, I can sympathise with you on the hang-over, although after lots of sleep I do feel a lot better. Water is my saviour. *g*

I've never tried a voice recognition programme, although it does sound kind of fun. When it picks up words like 'Gojyo' and gets them wrong, do you then have to manually go and change the mistakes? *not exactly sure how it works*

Also, your icon is gorgeous. :)

Sorry for the massive dealy in replying to this, but yes, when I say words the programme doesn't recognise, I have to go back and spell them out by voice, so it knows for next time. It takes it a few goes to learn. The more mistakes you change at the beginning, the better it learns to recognise your voice idiosyncracies.

Tea is the greatest thing ever. But that icon is pretty damn awesome, too. So pretty!

Mmmm, tea. Thank you... I didn't make it, but it is entirely lickable.

Hee! Are you sure about that? Yours is all nice and pretty and hardcover and stuff! Although I am not really surprised you could not resist. Mildmay! Felix! Tempting alone; irresistible together. They should make a movie about them. Or maybe an anime.

Oh, the anime would be beautiful in its angst! So much angst. Raging storms at sea, insanity, scars. And the magical buttsex! It's practically an anime already.

Except that Gojyo still tends to come out as 'got you' and Hakkai as 'I can'.

That's kind of awesome.

It really kind of is. So appropriate!

Whew! Glad to hear I wasn't the only one. :-)

I like writing drabbles by hand. I find it easier to play around with them like that, up to the final draft. I don't like writing anything longer by hand though.

Noooo, don't worry. My brain was quite clearly in neutral wehen we arranged that. *cries*

I find writing by hand so clunky for editing - I far prefer a computer.

We should reschedule too! Am on holiday the last couple of weeks of April though.

Hangover of blehhh

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