Writing Excuses

To say that this is my favorite podcast would not be fair. It is the only podcast I listen to. I've tried others but they all miss the mark. What mark is that you ask, well I'll tell you.

When perusing the vast expanse of itunes I sought out writing podcasts. Specifically a pod cast with a emphasis on fantasy writing. It was pretty slim pickins I'll tell you that much. I tried listening to Grammar Girl. Which isn't to bad except her show is really short, and it deals with the actual nuts and bolts of English, you know the mechanical stuff. All that is very important but it wasn't really what I was looking for.

A bunch of other podcasts that had a fantasy orientation seemed to focus on the casters story. I didn't really feel like listening to someone talk about their story and why it worked or didn't work.

Then I found Writing Excuses. It was nearly everything I could have hoped for. It consists of three hosts, all of which are established professionals. Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy writer, Howard Tayler is a web cartoonist, and Dan Wells is a horror writer. They get together once a week and produce a fifteen minute program about writing. They specifically target genre fiction. That includes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and the like. It's a really great show, though sometimes I wish it was longer than just fifteen minutes. I happily recommend their podcast to anyone interested in genre writing and even fiction writing in general. It can be downloaded from itunes for free.

Hope Fulfilled

So a while ago I bought the Dragon Naturally Speaking program. I must say that I am rather happy with it. In fact I am using it right now to write this post. It has made transferring my handwriting into the computer much quicker.

It does seem to have problems with proper names. Also it messes up when you mean to say "two" instead it comes out "to." But all those problems are not insurmountable. Working with the Naturally Speaking program and a keyboard I am able to write several paragraphs in a matter of minutes.

Where before it would take me hours to get a single page of a handwritten story on to the computer it now only takes me an hour to get three pages. So all in all was a good buy for me.