Touch Typing

One of my bugaboos is my typing speed and technique. Although I know how to  touch type, I am incredible slow at it. Especially compared to my favored technique, the look-at-my-hands-and-use-two-of-my-left-hand-fingers-and-three-of-my-right approach.

The really sad part is that I am actually much faster now than I was a few months ago. But, I really need to be able to touch type at all times.

It would help if I wasn't using a netbook keyboard half the time, but that's a whole other ball of wax.

So, in the interests of pushing myself over the edge (maybe not the best choice of words), I am issuing a new challenge to myself - the touch typing blog posting challenge. Basically, all of my blog posts, which I do every day, I am requiring myself to touch type. Every single one, all the way through.

This will guarantee that it takes me twenty or perhaps twenty five minutes to type each blog entry instead of my usual fifteen or so. But hopefully I will get past that pretty quick, and start picking up speed. Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.

I am going to push harder on my idea bank transcriptions as well, that they be done by touch. Not require, not yet, but likely soon. Then the final blow will be transitioning to only touch typing all my fiction.

In the long run I hope to save a fair amount of time. This is whole 'nother blog post, but lately I've been working on writing via voice recorder. Actual finished text not just ideas or whatever. So far I am spending more time than I'm saving, but touch typing fluently is one of the things that could turn that around.

Day Off Challenge, Week One - Complete!

I am happy to announce that week one of my day off story challenge is now completed. I wrote 2,300 words in one sitting thursday morning (with breaks, of course.) It took me almost 4 hours, from not long after I got up to just after noon.

Close to 600 words an hour is a pretty good clip for me. I vary between 500 and about 750, depending. The more thinking, the less words written, is the basic equation. This is the first full story I've ever finished in one go, and I'm quite proud of myself.

I had the idea already, just a basic seed I recorded the day before. I developed it as I wrote, and the only thing that stayed consistent was the setting, and the genre. I went into it with the idea that I might try to make more of a heroic story, but I fell back on tragedy.

The story does a fair amount of jumping around in viewpoints, for being so short. I feel good about the necessity of the switches though.

It's also modern day, and I had to do a bit of research (online) as I wrote. I kept the questionable details to a minimum and tried to concentrate on the story. There may very well be some stuff that knowledgeable (or even not so knowledgeable) folk will laugh at. I did the best I could, and made up what I needed to to make the story work.

The above is one reason I stay away from hard SF in general, or anything that I feel requires heavy research. At least in fields I'm not already well informed about. Write what you know, right?

I chose from four different ideas before I started writing, all ones I had recorded and transcribed of the last few months. I will likely do all three remaining ideas over the next few challenge slots, since they all are good for shorter stories.

I haven't decided yet what to do with this story. It is (in my rather biased opinion) worth sending out to paying markets, so I am a hesitant to use up first serial rights by putting it online. If I had more stories written, or more readers, I probably would, though.

As it is, this story is my eleventh completed one, and represents a ten percent addition to my (potentially) saleable output. So I am going to think on it for a bit.

The biggest lesson here, for me - It is entirely possible to develop a bare idea into a complete quality story in not just one day, but one sitting. And it's also a lot of fun :)

Challenges

I got the idea to start using challenges to motivate myself form Dean Wesley Smith (among many other great ideas.) I am sure the idea doesn't originate with him either, but he makes great use of it.

Basically, the idea is that you come up with something that you think you can do, but that is at the limits of your abilities, and set a repetitious goal related to the concept as a challenge. Example - for competitive eating - fifteen hotdogs at a sitting, every day. This is a slightly silly (and possible completely wronhgeaded, by virtue of being to easy or too hard) example, but it shows the concept.

If you repeat a difficult task, it gets easier. Soon hard becomes bearable, becomes cake. And the achievements, small on day one, pile up quickly.

As a writer, my biggest self imposed challenge is writing 1,250 words daily. This is about two or three hours worth of work for me, but sometimes only takes me one hour, especially at the beginnings of stories. I find word count much more concrete and measurable than pages or time spent, and thus more motivating.

The magic here is that a week of 1,250 days is easily a short story, maybe two. Or a few chapters of a novel. A few months make a collection, a short novel, or half a doorstop. And so on. It all adds up.

I have two new challenges I am imposing on myself. One, My daily blog post challenge, you are reading right now. I am on my fourth consecutive day, I believe. Whee!

The other  is my day-off story challenge. I intend to complete, from scratch, one new short story every day I have off (once a week.) I will use existing ideas, or new ones, but nothing I have already been working on.

I am giving myself some wiggle room - editing later is okay, so long as the story is done in one day. I don't expect epic length opuses (opi?) here, flash fiction to a few thousand words is fine. I am also still counting these stories as my daily word goal, so no double pressure.

Can I do it? I don't know. Will I succeed every week? Probably not. But I bet I learn a whole heck of a lot about tight storytelling, and how to get my creative process on a fast track.

I haven't decided what to do with these stories, I may put them up here for free, for a short time at least, or I may shop the ones that I feel or saleable around. Haven't got that far yet. I am wanting to do podcasts, so maybe some of these will be useable for that purpose, after Tes-Nin is done.

All depends on what I write and how the challenge goes, really. Wish me luck.