On my Patreon I just uploaded a ton of my audio notes that I take while working on a book. It took me AGES to move away from writing notes with pen and paper. In fact, one of my original happy accidents happened because of that. I was writing notes about my first book and I thought Jyen was Garm in a note. But Garm had been a man. And I couldn’t understand why “Girl” (didn’t have a name yet) was talking about that. And I thought, why not make Garm a woman? It added a lot more complexity than having Garm be a man. Presto.
But I’m not a fast texter. And it tends to spellcheck and look like hell. Basically, nothing was faster and easier than scribbling on a scrap of paper. I had pens all over the place and I’d walk out with a little bit of paper and write all over it.
Voice to text is still pretty terrible. Especially out in the world with lots of ambient noise and talking about Boranjame and plasma pistols. You end up with sentences that are complete gibberish and you can’t even guess their original meaning.
But I’ve been taking audio notes for some years now and it works great. I thought I had purged them all, but I posted about 80(!) just on Hard Luck Hank 7: Dumber Than Dead. I’m going to grab a random one and post it here as an FYI.
I take notes usually while walking around. Usually I’m walking my dog. So I’m winded, there is literal wind, and ambient background noise.
