Friday, August 24, 2007

Writing Is Hard to Do July 22, 2005

Why is the 3rd book so hard to do? I've got 4K words on the comp--and probably another 4-6k longhand. I know what's going in and where, chronology, plotting, major characters, they're all there. It's as if it's already written, thank the muses, but not visible. I still need to do the grunt work.

Most voice recognition programs are dreck. You need to train them to your speech mannerisms and individual dialect, then go back and edit what they don't get so you might as well type in everything since there's no time savings. To think I got a D in typing class, lol. Ah well, that was in the pre-Cobol/Fortran days when computers were the size of walk-in closets.

Great old sci-fi story: The computers around the world were finally hooked together and running. One old scientist realized that was a VERY BAD idea and tried to unplug the master comp called Colossus. He was zapped by lightning from the mainframe.

One scientist said, "Oh God!"

Second scientist in despair, "There is no God."

The computer answers: "There is, now."

Ref. Colossus, the Forbin Project.

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