Back to the topic at hand, I left off the last post ready to tackle the letters between Walter and me. And so I did! Well, I started by reviewing what I had been carrying around all these years: letters from Walter to me, photocopies of my letters to him, a few audio tapes, and printouts of some of the letters. Back a while ago when I had a Macintosh computer (late 1980s?), I had begun typing up the letters. The diskette for them was long lost so all I had were the printouts. Not much help since I would have to retype them.
But wait, there might be a better solution: speech recognition software! I had an old version of Dragon Naturally Speaking on my computer so I could read the letters out loud and they would be captured in a word processing file. I first heard about Dragon Naturally Speaking when a colleague told me that he used it after he got carpal tunnel syndrome and was unable to type. I gave it a try -- reading the letters was definitely easier than typing them all, but the results were disappointing! It was easy enough to read the letters, but the software mangled a lot of the words. Not good enough! I got discouraged about the project and lost momentum.
At a party at my neighbor's house last February I met Johanna. I had mentioned that I was working on a book, and
she and others asked about the topic. I began an explanation at a fairly high
level saying it was based on a romance from the 1980s. Johanna took me aside
and asked me more and more questions, saying that she was particularly
interested in romance. She was clearly fascinated by the story, and at one
point as I talked, she pointed out that my face had lit up while talking about
the letters and the experience. This conversation was a real inspiration to me, and immediately I began to regain interest in the project.
The next day after taking a walk I got to talking to another neighbor, Dan
Connolly. Once again I mentioned that I was writing a book, but was kind of stuck. He immediately went into his house for a book he wanted me to read. It was The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield. Dan had bought the book at the airport and read it while waiting for a plane. The
interesting thing to me about this book was that the act of
giving it to me inspired me, even as much as the book itself. It felt like the world -- or my neighborhood, at least -- wanted me to get going.
These two incidents, one with Johanna and the other with
Dan, put me back on the right track. Monday morning I began in earnest to
dictate and edit the letters. With this new inspiration, I bought and installed the latest version of Dragon to try again. The first step in using speech recognition software is to "train" it to understand your speech. Once I did the training (by reading some passages aloud) and identifying myself as a speaker of "Southern English," I
had much greater success. Version 11 of Dragon was greatly
improved, and I could immediately have more confidence in the results. Another hurdle crossed!
During this time I was deeply immersed in Walter's life in 1984, as I read aloud his letters and remembered the incidents he referred to. It almost felt like I was intruding, although of course these letters had been written to me. But they were written 27 years ago between two individuals were in such a different place, oh, those many years ago. The question occurred to me whether Walter would still be willing for me to publish the letters. I hadn't been in touch with him for decades, since 1989, so finding him was the next challenge!
Future posts: finding Walter, revisiting the past, plugging gaps in my memory, . . .
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