Taming the Dragon May Provide Solace/ Remedie for Wary Writers Paws After CampNaNoWriMo

This morning I woke up with my hands stiff. Half asleep I noticed how painful it was to make a fist. This is what always seems to happen by the end of a NaNoWriMo run. Camp NaNo Day 28, and I have 5,799 words to go. Minus the 433 I wrote this morning before breakfast.
 
That pain in my hands is worrisome, and while dozing (off), I started thinking of the Dragon speech recognition program. Years ago, I played with the trial version, and discovered the program had a problem with my accent. However, the Dragon can be tamed, or at least trained to recognize the particularities of my tongue. Still, the learning curve is what I fear, for Dragon as well as myself. I dream on, about dictating interesting parts from my journals, now wouldn't that be convenient?

After my first cup of jasmine green tea, I tried the Dragon App on my iPhone, speaking Dutch. Not bad, although some words went missing, and the App clearly is made for short runs, for more wordy dictation Dragon Dictate for Mac must be the way to go. Then I changed the language back to American English. Surprise, surprise, in the years since my first encounter with the Dragon my pronunciation has become more recognizable.

Dragon's misinterpretation of certain words is understandable and funny. See below. NaNoWriMo becomes nano rhino, and iPhone becomes Twitter. This could be an unexpected and useful extra for  ESL speakers to check on their pronunciation.  That my "dozing" is spelled with an "s" reminds me of the father of a friend up north in the Netherlands who claimed he could hear I was from Amsterdam, because of the way my zees sounded like esses. Which I could not imagine to be true. There was no way on earth my parents would have let me get away with that.
No "We gaan naar Sandvoort aan de See," where it should be "Zandvoort aan de zee" in our home!

This morning I woke up with my hands stiff half-asleep I noticed how painful it was to make a fist this is what always seems to happen by the end of the nano rhino run camps nano date 28 and I have 5799 words to go minus the 433 I wrote this morning before breakfast that pain in my hands is worrisome and while dosing I start thinking off to Dragon speech recognition prep program I play Twitter trial version and discovered the program had a problem with my accent however the Dragon can be changed or at least trained to recognize the particularities of my tongue still the learning curve is what I fear for Dragon as well as myself I dream

Dragon does well by me. Still, I'm not confident enough about my tongue to connect the Dragon App with Facebook and Twitter, imagine the trouble I could get into ...
Meanwhile, the old paws have unfurled, while writing this post, there's hope, with or without Dragon.


This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Audio Book Listener Charmed by Elizabeth McGovern's Narration of The Chaperone

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Since I was looking at chauffeur duty for a good month, I thought to do what a librarian told me works for her, listen to an audio book in her car, and read whenever she can. Take it from me, the combination of listening and reading worked like a charm. Twice a day, in the morning on my way back home, and in the evening back to the city, Elizabeth McGovern kept me engaged with her narration of the story of Cora Carlisle, and in between the rides I read.
Was it a coincidence that the main character's name is the same as that of the character our narrator Elizabeth McGovern plays in Downton Abbey? For some reason I kept on thinking, I know that voice, and I started to expect a certain behavior, and in a way Cora Carlisle and Cora Crawley née Levinson do have something in common. The times, the corset, their roles as wives and mothers in society, even if their station in life, their lifestyle and the era is (slightly) different, and one is the wife of a lawyer, the other of a British Lord.
The story of both the chaperone, and that of her charge, silent movie star Louise Brooks as a fifteen-year-old going to N.Y. City to try her luck in the dance world is compelling.
The housewife, the teen and people around them all have secrets that color their own and one another's lives.
While a historical novel, much of the subject material in The Chaperone will resonate with readers of today. Adoption, forbidden love and lust, abuse, fame and glory, Moriarty kept me engaged from the beginning to the end.

View all my reviews
This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.