How to Enjoy Life and Accomplish Tasks While Doing It

Over three three-day vacations to Ohio, including motorcycle rides and speaking Spanish to truckers, I had over fifty hours of recorded conversation that I gathered in person. I was ready to depart from the interview step. However, the pointed information gathering that formed the foundation of our nonfiction novel was locked on a recording device. I remember my husband entering the room to check on me while I worked and he cared for our kids. His first comment at the sound of the voices on the recording was, “were you guys drunk the whole time?” If only.

What one does not understand, can oftentimes be identified as one’s greatest nightmare. Nightmares take a great many forms. For some it is not remaining complacent with the status quo. For others it is not moving forward with one’s goals. For me it is both. And so, I breathe and clear my mind. I choose to move forward with my goals and maintain the dichotomy that I am a stay at home mom with a book project that allows me to gain respect for myself as I practice a skill and connect with family.

We were novices—my mother and I. I did not have a lot of time to research and neither of us knew where to start. It was 2013 and I was caring for a toddler and a four year old who control peed (sometimes on me), neither of them took the naps I anticipated when I began the book project. The lack of night-time sleep from my two little ones trained my brain to think quickly on little sleep. We figured there must be some type of software out there that deciphered the mp3 file of our voices. A transcription service of sorts. We did not know many writers at the time either so had no one to ask. But I was able to draw on past experiences. When I worked and got paid, I directed a college admissions department. Dragon speak was an oral translation service we used as a learning accommodation for kids with dyslexia. The computer program spoke the words the student saw jumbled on the computer screen. I knew transcription services existed, I determined they must as I considered the precursory technology. My mother was on the same predictive path. She knew my father used a speech dictation service to write up his notes as a CEO. Yet we were two years out of the workforce and had no clue how to figure out this step in our writing process.

We were determined to make information extraction easier. When I ran into a Nobel Prize winning author,Taylor Branch, at a one year old birthday party, I decided I had no other option than to bother him with a writing question and asked him what he used. I knew that he had hours of taped conversations between himself and President Bill Clinton (whom he had befriended in college, see 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon for my perspective on this) during the writing of his book, The Clinton Tapes. I respect Branch as more of a family man than his cohort Clinton. He told me he used a foot pedal and that he transcribed the tapes himself. Branch’s book is thick. Perhaps there was a benefit to doing it on my own. I thought his process would reveal a greater depth of perspective.

When I informed my mother, she was determined that technology was the way to go. It was a time saver. Because it was her perspective, she purchased a non commercial version of dictation software. I trained the software to my voice and we were up and running. Until I reviewed the transcript, that is. At some points during the interviews, there were three voices. And they were not always the same. The computer program was not advanced enough for us. It could not transcribe multiple inflections, tones and sounds.The transcript was an indecipherable mashup. It became a different puzzle to solve. I did not know where all of the pieces were and therefore could not project the amount of time it would take to complete in this fashion. I had the notes, but they were not detailed enough to decipher the words. I would still need to return to the audio recording and it had no location marking information on it. I had to pay attention to the actual time log of each recording so that I could make use of my moments of free time.

Hand transcription took an entire summer and ended up being fun for me. It got me to think further into the material and focus on the information. It helped me hear my brother’s voice and learn the nuances of it. The fact that his voice in our book is a biographical one allowed me to understand him better, I connected to his tone and structure. Like a good story, I trained my brain to think in his same pattern.

What my husband perceived as me being a vacation drunkard, revealed itself as an overachieving hobbyist looking to connect with her family and to have fun while doing it. Luckily he voiced his concern and I could explain to him what was happening. I slowed down time externally, I had not hidden from him and escaped to Ohio to be reckless. I deciphered how the information was organized in my device and I turned the voices into slow mo speed. That way I did not need to rewind as much.