This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

I really like this map! (Thanks, B.) Super interesting.


From mentalfloss.com. Image credit: Ben Blatt/Slate.

Also, for them that's interested, the other day, to my astonishment, I wrote two and a half pages. Or, as I emailed to a particular group of interested friends, "tuna half pages." There are certain dictation errors that I encounter so frequently that at a certain point I give up correcting them and they enter our lexicon as a kind of code. My correspondents, who are usually not dictating, use them as much as I do. (And now I've remembered one of my favorite (of my own) blog posts, about dictation errors, angst, and Prufrock ^_^.)

I wish you all well on this Wednesday.

I try not to make my blog Whinge Central, but this information might actually be helpful for some of you out there. So: I'm sure Dragon Dictate's latest version of dictation software for Mac users (by Nuance) is useful to someone with some job, but I'm sorry to say that if you happen to be a writer who works with manuscripts that are a few hundred pages long, it amounts to highly-priced garbage. The program is designed to be simultaneously conscious of every word in your manuscript, so that you can verbally navigate to any point – a feature I have no need for, but that I'm not given the option of turning off – and it's quite limited, apparently, in the number of words it can manage at once. If I have my Dragon Dictate microphone turned on and I click into my current 280-page manuscript, the software flips out, freezes, then takes several minutes to crash.  Every single time. When I called Nuance's (consistently appalling) customer service, I was told to dictat…

Happy Pan-Universal Be Who You Are Day! Someone who uses voice recognition software and draws should start a VRS comic strip. The objects that appear suddenly in my scenes because my VRS has misunderstood me are visually amusing. I just dictated the line, "'I will,' she said with a sob," and my VRS typed, "'I will,' she said with a saw." I feel like a spontaneous saw could really add something to a conversation.Gentlemen of Cambridge: to the man, when faced with a long, narrow corridor of sidewalk between snowbanks, you have waited at your end and let me pass first. This has literally happened to me twelve times since the storm (which I know because at a certain point I started counting). In this northeast USA city (meaning, a city where strangers tend not to pay much attention to each other and rudeness is not particularly unusual), I am startled and touched by this thoughtfulness, then startled that I am touched. Thank you for your gentlemanly beh…

Wednesday was one of those days where you wake up and it's so dark outside that you feel like there must've been some mix-up with the sun. And it never gets any brighter, and also your hands hurt, but you have to do a lot of computer work anyway, and because your hands hurt, you're clumsy, and because you're clumsy, you keep spilling crumbs and splattering liquids everywhere on account of a person must eat, and it sucks to have to clean everything all up, because your hands hurt.

I depend on my dictation software for my e-mail communications and the transcription of my work. I'm inexpressibly grateful for its existence. BUT that doesn't mean that it doesn't make me livid with anger, even bring me close to tears, from time to time. There are just some days where nothing works; no matter where you put the microphone, no matter how distinctly you speak, it won't get any of your words right, and nothing works, and you have to use your hands. On Wednesday, i…

When I'm really, really tired and trying to juggle too many balls (metaphorically), sometimes my short-term memory completely vanishes. For example, I'll be walking along the street, see the cash machine, and think to myself, "Maybe I should get some cash just in case I need it at the airport tomorrow. Should I? Shouldn't I? Yes, I should!", I'll think, proud of myself for making an important travel-related decision. Then I'll look around in confusion, wonder why I'm having a conversation with myself on the sidewalk, and walk home. Forgetting all about the cash. Or, something that just happened 15 minutes ago: I'll let myself into the lobby of my building, and then, as I'm walking the short distance to my door, put my keys away in my bag, proud of myself for this excellent example of multitasking. Finding myself at my door, I'll stare at the door in confusion, remember I need the key to get inside, then panic for a moment, because I can…

If only it actually were true, as J. Alfred Prufrock says, that there will be time for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea. In my experience, a single revision can take months. :o)

As I recently promised I would do, I have been dictating *everything* with my voice recognition software, rather than typing, in order to be kind to my arms. It's made a huge difference. But there are certain frequent errors that are making me crazy and even, on occasion, worrying me deeply. My VRS frequently mistakes "will" for "won't" and "won't" for "will." It also mistakes "ever" for "forever," and vice versa. This means that I could say to someone, "I will love you forever," but my VRS could write, "I WON'T love you EVER." Luckily (?), another common mistake is the misrecognition of "loathe" for "love," so maybe what the VRS would actually write is, "…

Last week, while stuck in traffic on I-95 in preparation for being extremely late to my trapeze conditioning class, I noticed that the leaves are starting to change. Hooray!

I'm reading a mystery by Ellis Peters called The House of Green Turf. I've been enjoying it from the first sentence: But for a five minute shower of rain, and a spattering of pennystone clay dropped from the tailboard of a lorry, Maggie Tressider would have driven on safely to her destination, that day in August, and there would never have been anything to cause her to look back over her shoulder and out of her ivory tower, nothing to make the mirror crack from side to side, nothing to bring any unforeseen and incomprehensible curse down upon her.

I wouldn't generally recommend a 78-word opening sentence to a book, so why do I like this one? Because somehow, by the end of that first sentence, the setting, the protagonist, and the plot are all intriguing and real to me. The five-minute shower, the spatt…

Note to those who are reading this post in an e-mail, or anywhere other than my blog actual: if you don't see the short video immediately below, this post isn't going to make a whole lot of sense to you. You might want to read this one on my actual blog, which is here.

Press play!



Note: When the VRS recognizes a word that I do not say, that word is shown in red font. The correct word, if there is one, follows in brackets, in green font. Similarly, when I say a word that the VRS misses entirely, that word is shown in brackets, in green font. (My apologies to any readers who are color blind!)

Hello everybody! This is your friendly author Krif[s]tin here, and I’m going to give you a little demonstration of my voice recognition software. Below this video, I will post the uncorrected text of this dictation. Read along, and see for yourself how well it works.

Stopover to become really like that [Here's how well the software works if you talk really really fast] about the[trains an…

I'm annoyed that my voice recognition software recognizes Ludwig Wittgenstein on the first try but doesn't recognize Miss Marple. Humph. (To be fair, it doesn't recognize Lord Peter Wimsey, either. But nor does it recognize Luce Irigaray. But it recognizes Jo March. But not Gilbert Blythe. AARGHHH!)

(Incidentally, my favorite VRS kerfuffle recently was when I dictated, "He dropped his pen suddenly and stood with eyes closed, massaging his hand," and my computer wrote, "He dropped his pants suddenly and stood with eyes closed, massaging his hand.")

So, I leave for Vail on Wednesday, followed by many cities in a short amount of time, and since I've never done a tour before, I'm not sure how much blogging time I'll have. Don't be surprised if you don't hear from me regularly for the next few weeks. (The tour ends October 15.)

There's an FAQ about being an introvert and dealing with appearance anxiety that I've been wanting to …