I have been a big fan of the podcast Writing Off Social for a while now, and I met the podcast hosts, Sandy and Mary K., at the 2025 Novel Marketing Conference. I had taken their Writing Off Social—the Course Lite , and while I was very, very good, I felt it didn’t have as many insights for fiction authors as opposed to nonfiction authors. Which makes sense since Sandy and Mary K. both write nonfiction. When I talked to them about it at the conference, I spouted off some feedback I had come up with while listening to their course, and they asked me to write it down in an email and send it to them. Well, I had time to wait at the airport and it turned into a huge long email missive with lots of information. They were very gracious and invited me to join them for an interview on their podcast, which was totally exciting! It was my first podcast interview! I was a complete dork! But we didn’t talk about everything in the email I’d written to them since we didn’t have time. I thou...
These are my thoughts on week 3 of the Fictator-in-Training Roadmap by Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. Actually, it’s more about the third module of the Fictation course she has, since the Roadmap is taking us through her course. In this third module, she recorded herself dictating her entire novella, from outlining to the end of the rough draft. She fast-forwards through most of it so you’re not literally watching her dictate the entire novella, but she stops sometimes to comment and give tips. I didn’t find this all that useful, except for a few videos where she’s trying different apps. She even tries dictation on her mother’s old PC computer. I did like how she compared 3 different recording/transcription apps on her phone and showed the differences in accuracy between all three, plus her pros and cons for each. As I mentioned before, she doesn’t go into services that cost a lot of money such as Dragon Anywhere, but I recently heard about an AI transcription website called turboscribe...