Morning Pages - stream of consciousness

Well here I am again, sitting at my laptop again, trying to think of something to say. All of the advice that I have read says just write something and keep writing other things, until inspiration strikes. (Not all but I put it that way for dramatic effect.) I admit I hadn't thought about Morning Pages in relation to dictation software yet it makes perfect sense. I should be able to get up in the morning and the first thing that I do - dictate to the computer in a flow of consciousness. I think I need to reread the morning pages book by Julia , her surname escapes me. [Cameron].

I also need to look up to other things to help me with my workflow. I need to check on how to easily move files from my phone to my laptop, that is Android to Windows 10, to enable the transcription process. Damn, the other what the other thing is has slipped out of my head but I'm sure there were two things I wanted to check on, I think it has something to do with software operation but I will have to check.

I'm writing this in the draft mode of my Blogger application, Open Life Writer, and it wouldn't normally be something I would post on a blog but writing is writing and if I post things I do like this it helps to keep me honest. My blog isn't a specialist blog, my posts jump about and the only common linking factor is me, so I will post this as a way of tracking development. If I progress this will be just a step in that process and I feel more likely to progress if the things that I dictate/write actually go somewhere. I need to get used to writing for an audience, so the actual act of posting what I write may well help me to tighten up my language.

It is hard thinking about posting this when there are so many heartfelt blogs out there, actually posting it is as easy as two clicks, I think I'll need to post this pronto and add to it or write another post if I want to continue with more to say. This text already forms part of my Morning Pages for today and I'm pleased about that. While I can type at dictation speed I have produced this piece of text in much less time than I would have done if I thought about it and typed it and it somehow feels more authentically me (as opposed to typing which is also me but half edited by my internal critic as it happens.)  [I have had to edit it to make a little more sense, it seems dictation is no cure for editing.]

Posting by voice

It's taken a while to get to the point where I can write blog posts via the Dragon professional program. Setting up the dictation program was the easy part getting to the point where I could dictate a blog post, as I use Google Blogger, was a little more complex.

Initially I thought I could dictate straight into a windowing chrome but the computer kept freezing. I don't believe it's a lack of peril on the part of my laptop as it has a sixth generation i5 processor and runs Windows 10. I did try to open the Blogger site with Microsoft Edge in case it was an issue with the chrome browser but I had the same problem with the computer locking up.

I then remembered that Word has a blog template but unfortunately that no longer works with Google Blogger so I couldn't attach the blog template to my blog. It took some searching before I found a program that would work, I remembered Windows Live Writer was an option in the past but it had been discontinued in 2016; fortunately, it turned out that Microsoft made an open source version available which was called Open Live Writer.

I've installed Open Live Writer and within a few clicks I had set it up to work with my Google Blogger account. I am dictating this blog post to celebrate the fact that I can dictate into a blog template and, if all goes well in a moment, post it to my blog.