Oh Look, I Still Exist!

     I'm gonna do this split-style, if you will. I'm going to combine an explanation of why I wasn't writing and what I've done about it, a long and not-un-farce-laced narrative, with chatting about the tree we have this year. We're not religious, but we grew up with Secular Christmas (well, OK, my husband grew up with Religious Christmas but that doesn't make him a believer). It's been twenty-eight years since we've been able to spend it with wider family, unless you count five years ago when a close friend of my father, now a dear friend of mine as well, spent insane amounts of money to speed me to his side after his strokes; a Mayo Clinic Christmas was actually surprisingly welcoming and comforting under such circumstances.

NaNoWriMo challenge; working at an absolutely non-ergonomic desk in not-particularly-intelligent ways trying to type 50,000 words in a month during lengthy workdays was far from ideal and exacerbated my borderline carpal tunnel issues and similar to no end. It is, however, that very (65,000-word by the end of that month!) manuscript which forms the basis of the novel with which I'm currently extremely happy -- the one I was suddenly and brutally convinced I wasn't going to be able to work on again for some time, if at all.
     Where am I going with this? It turns out that I have De Quervain's tenosynovitis in my left hand. This discovery was not gradual. One day, I woke up and my hand was oddly, badly sore. By the end of that day, it was so swollen, red, and hot that I couldn't use it at all. Obviously I went to the doctor (I'm not in the United States where I grew up, where that would have been prohibitively expensive), and she referred me to a physiotherapist, and he referred me to an ergotherapist, and she gave me a brace (which I spaced up a bit, it was boring). Unfortunately it's not getting better as quickly as had been hoped, and I've been wearing the brace for weeks now... which brings home for me how long it's been since I've done a blog entry! Gosh I'm sorry!
Even wearing the brace, it turns out to be far too easy for me to overuse my hand for crazy stuff like cooking, writing, putting on clothes, and all that jazz. If I want to avoid steroid injections into the joint, which I overwhelmingly do because although I'm not intimidated by the injections themselves they don't last very long and after the first few they begin to cause damage, I need to act like this hand is completely out of commission. Which means no lengthy typing.

so on but I wanted some piney cheer and sparkly lights this year, I'm sure you understand; why not do up some ornaments which can dangle from garlands yearly throughout the ages? We were concerned, though, that a tree was going to be too much of a financial stretch this time. Nonetheless my daughter and I hit the local pet store's tiny tree lot to see what we might be able to afford... And lo and behold, they had three big trees and a bunch of little scraggly ones and the nicest tree of all was broken: the long peak branch you put the topper on was snapped off. Heck, easy fix! They sold us that tree for ten bucks, and what a beauty it is. Here it is after I fixed the peak issue and before we decorated it.

     But wait, you're thinking, oh my postulated and probably imaginary reader (no offense; I'm mostly imaginary myself)! Is not this entry itself evidence of writing? Well, yes, because of the saga which I am now about to relate. And quite the tale it is, and although successful in the end, it has been one of the stupidest things I've been through in years.
     How am I writing this? Voice recognition software. First, I researched whether or not there are multiple options for voice recognition software and really, for something like a novel, it turns out that there are not. Sure, there are lots of free dictation programs but very little that allows command-based voice editing and there's only one in which custom word lists can be saved -- essential to my needs, given how many of my technologies, character names, and kinds of wildlife don't appear in regular dictionaries because I made them up. This is, therefor, being written with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Although – and I cannot stress this enough — I absolutely adore it, I am forced to report that the version it was necessary to get, because of financial constraints, is not as represented, and one piece of erroneous information on their website led to days and days of extreme stress and the conviction that I would both be unable to use the program and would be out an amount of money that took three months of saving, underselling an art piece, and accepting a financial gift from a friend to get together. But, all that said, here we are.

even though it's exactly what I need; so it goes. Lectures on why its "worth the expense" to get better things don't fall on deaf ears but at the same time don't somehow magically create the money to do that with). According to their website, NaturallySpeaking is absolutely compatible with said free program, and they provide detailed instructions for using it.
     This turns out to not even slightly be true. It was, however, some time before I was able to identify this, with the help of some amazing people over at an online forum. At first it was maddening trying to figure out why my program wasn't working. None of the error messages related to what I was trying to do, none of the commands worked reliably, multiple crashes ensued. Because this kind of random kablooeyness is often a sound issue, one of my awesome friends was kind enough to send me an excellent headset, which I checked against the stats online and with the people at the forum. That was not the problem. My forum saviors explained to me that first of all, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is not compatible with this word processor, no matter what it says on the website. Secondly, they detailed all the failings with this particular version, not reflected in the descriptions on the website. For example, one of the things they suggested to try was to change my profile. This is, they said, easy. All one has to do is click on the menu under options allowing one to do that. Except it turns out this version doesn't have that menu. Luckily, my husband is a profiles troubleshooter, and was able to help with that part.

     Here are some ornaments celebrating people who have helped me and/or inspired me this year.

reaching out that inspire me even more. She was fantastic and gracious enough to respond to my Tweet about the ornament, and it fills me with joy that she found happiness in it.

     Back to the struggles with software. Now that I knew that NaturallySpeaking isn't compatible with the program I was using, I discussed things with the forum and it turns out to be completely compatible with WordPad (which I am now using). So of course I fired up the book in WordPad, assuming that the fact that I always save it in rich text format so that at some point it can easily be saved as a Word document if necessary would be enough to work in WordPad. Unfortunately, no. Although, to my immense gratification, I could dictate text easily, and it appeared like magic before me upon the screen, the commands did not work. Anytime I said something like "select that" or "scratch that" or "go to end of line", the program would sit there processing for a while, with a little "not responding" note for me to look at, until it crashed. Anytime I tried to correct a word so that the program could learn, the same thing happened. The people on the forum kept assuring me that of course, if all else failed, I could always use its own internal word processor, DragonPad. But, again, no! The same problems were manifest there as well. That really shouldn't be. I could dictate, and the text appeared, but I could not use commands, and it very quickly began to act bogged down and eventually started crashing again, every time, whether or not I was using commands.

     Here are all of the ornaments I painted, before we decorated the tree.

     A lot of good suggestions were made on the voice recognition forum about profiles and sound systems and troubleshooting, but given that nobody there would be seen dead using this particular version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, none of them was able to troubleshoot it for me. One guy did come on and Solve Everything, ha ha ha (screenshot!):

     Whatever, dude.

     I've thanked everyone else on the forum for their help, and sent them this year's holiday card -- here it is for YOU!

     That pretty much ends the structural part of the saga: in the long run, after cleaning out old profile information and restarting everything, it was clear that simply any trace of contamination from that open source word processing program was the issue. After I copied the text of my entire novel over to Notepad, saved it as plain text, moved it back to WordPad, and re-saved it as rich text, it all functioned properly. As you can see for yourself because you're reading this (wow, you're still here? Thank you!), the program works fine in WordPad now. So in this way life is good.

     There is, however, a second adventure — now hilarious, in retrospect: trying to get the company who made this program to simply admit that this one snippet of information on their website is erroneous. It was ultimately unsuccessful (no surprise there) but the chain is gold. Here it is in short.
     I replied directly to my proof of purchase/order confirmation email asking to be put in touch with someone who can discuss the idea of partial compensation because of the misrepresentation of their own product and the immense hassle I went through for days because of it. They replied that they could find no record of an order. They asked me for several pieces of information, such as my address and my full name, which I politely pointed out could be found by scrolling down because I was, again, replying to the ORDER CONFIRMATION. Should they be so kind as to glance lower in said e-mail they would also find the phrase "please see this as proof of purchase", the serial number of the copy I bought, and the SKU. They said oopsie, oh look here is your order; then they told me I needed to visit their support page. I explained that I had already spent hours on their support page, had already obtained help from a forum, and was trying to talk to them about a sales issue.

     Here are another couple of ornaments I painted (and a cloth one I bought as a teenager, far away from here).

     The next e-mail I got explained that I had contacted the sales office and that I should visit the support page. Again. I replied that I had already spent hours on the support page, had already obtained help from a forum, and actually wanted to discuss a sales issue. They replied that I needed to visit the support page. This time I simply asked them to forward my email to someone who was willing to actually read it. To this communique, I received an email asking me what my problem is. I replied that I was hoping to receive some form of partial compensation for the amount of money I spent on a program which turned out not to be suitable to my needs even though they had represented it as such on their website, and that I've had to do quite a bit of workaround hassle just to get the program working at all. To this — I kid you not — they replied that my request was denied because I "mentioned that I misrepresented to the program". Ummm… What?

support, that I hope never to have to deal with them or the parent company again in my life, and to have a nice holiday season.
     Obviously, I never expected to get anywhere with any of this. In fact, I would've dropped the entire thing if they'd responded to my first email by saying, "Oops, that shouldn't be in FAQ, thanks, will address it." But no, instead for whatever reason, the lowest-level techs they have aren't allowed to escalate. I'm not blaming them, I myself have been trapped using a second or third language trying to solve problems way outside my payscale and not being allowed to delegate. It sucks.

     Now that the program works to some limited degree we're done; the goal of finding out whether or not this company has any intention of standing by its product has been achieved. Oh, they absolutely do it for REAL people, you know: the ones who buy suites of professional versions and not this dinky-assed Home version. People who matter in the world. If you get it for your corporation, they'll even send out a whole team of people to install it for you and train your minions, but God forbid they should answer one simple question for the likes of me. 
     It's cool, though; as you can see for yourself because you are reading these words with your eyes or ears or fingers (at any rate with your brain somehow), I am finally able to write again, and will be blathering on at you again as often as possible, for what that's worth. Hoping to have something for you again for New Year's Day but meanwhile, here's the tree in its completionhood. See that cheesy plastic planet in the cage I made to replace the broken peak? That is precious to me: I got it five years ago, when I was able to see my father in his darkest hour, while buying him a 24-hour clock (remarkably difficult to find in the United States) because he was still having trouble with knowing whether he'd slept two hours or twelve.

Please stay safe, folks, and please, please, hang in there. Walk in love.