It Gets Frustrating

Overall, I love my job. I get to stay up late at night, sleep late in the morning, and spend my days sitting on my butt telling stories. It darn sure beats working for a living! But that doesn’t mean it can’t be frustrating at times.

Yesterday I started the day close to the halfway point in Ka-Bar Karma, my new John Lee Quarrels book. I normally narrate a chapter or two into my Sony digital recorder, then plug the recorder into my computer and transcribe it with Dragon software. The software converts it to a Word file, and I paste the chapters into a Word document with the complete manuscript. But I decided to use Word’s built-in dictation software because it’s actually more accurate than Dragon. But that comes with its own set of problems.

I was working away and had about three hours under my belt when all of a sudden, everything I had done just disappeared. Don’t ask me where it went because I don’t know. After saying a bunch of words that I’m sure had my dear old mother rolling over in her grave, I did some research, and it turns out that you have to manually turn on One Drive to automatically save your work every time when using the dictation feature. Otherwise, it just seems to sit there and at some point says I’ve had enough and just disappears.

I lost about 3,900 words, as near as I can figure, and that’s a lot of work. Fortunately, it was all fresh in my mind, and I was able to re-create it within a couple of hours, this time using the digital recorder. But if that hadn’t happened and I had been working on fresh material in those two hours, I would be well past the halfway point. That’s where the frustrating part comes in.

And who knew writing mysteries could be dangerous? I was sitting at my desk working away yesterday afternoon, and suddenly my left arm on the inside, just above the crook of my elbow, felt like it was on fire. It was red and swollen to about half again the normal size. I took some Benadryl, Terry applied some Benadryl gel and an ice pack, and in a couple of hours it was pretty much back to normal. Somebody suggested that it might be a noseeum bite, but they are all over the place here and I get bit by them on a regular basis. This was something else altogether. Or maybe that was my mom sending a message from the grave saying, “watch your language, young man!” Sorry, mom.

In other news, the print edition of Big Lake Shootout is now available on Amazon, and the book already has 50 reviews. I love my readers! You can order the print version or the e-book at this link.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for a new Free Drawing. This week’s prize is an audiobook of Crazy Days In Big Lake, the third book in my Big Lake mystery series. To enter, click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing, please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn Sunday evening. Note: Due to the high shipping cost of printed books and Amazon restrictions on e-books to foreign countries, only entries with US addresses and e-mail addresses are allowed.

Thought For The Day – You can’t keep getting mad at people for sucking the life out of you if you keep giving them the straw.