Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
When trying to type my autobiography, (Escape from Destiny) with a mouth stick, that is, a piece of wood with rubber tubing on the ends, it was time-consuming, to say the least. It also gave me chapped lips, and a cracking jaw from constantly holding the stick on one side of my mouth.Eventually, computers evolved so I could type on a software keyboard (a picture of a keyboard on the screen) and type by head movements and an air tube I blew into.Somewhat better but, still pretty slow. In about seven hours, I could type 1000 words on a good day.I think voice typing was, sort of, around, but it ran on a separate computer, as a keyboard to the first, and was very expensive. Computers were still pretty slow.Today, and for the last several years, I've been using Using Dragon naturally speaking, I can type 1000 words in about 1/2 hour or so.It also spells a lot better than I do. Sometimes when somebody asks me how to spell something, I just turn on Dragon naturally speaking and say the word, shazam, there it is.When I had my swimming accident in 1976 and lost the ability to move my arms or legs, there was no home computer. What a difference. It's like having a building secretary in my computer that takes dictation whenever I'm ready. I'm also writing a screenplay using Dragon naturally speaking. It's about this old guy that was just put in a nursing home by his daughter.The old guy, with the help of his granddaughter, will go back in time, and save the world from imminent destruction.Oh yeah, I am working on one more. "I was a foster parent." A lot of baloney there, believe me, but not where I expected it from.It would be nearly impossible to do my writing without Dragon NaturallySpeaking. By the way, it's 11: 32 PM and I'm laying in bed writing this (voice typing) using my laptop, turned on its side, on a table next to me. How cool is that!Very important, I use their PaperPort too. One very important advantage over hard folders, is that you can put one folder in another folder in another folder. Try doing that with your real file cabinet. I've developed a pretty simple system, that even I can follow :-)I have about 25 filing cabinets of information in my computer, and I can actually find all of it. I've never lost anything. Even though I turn my computer off during thunderstorms and I've never lost data, I always keep plenty of backups.On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate NaturallySpeaking, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and NaturallySpeaking spelled that.Looking forward, Fred