While my PhD Journey is filled with drops in enthusiasm, it's also been filled with life's curve balls--especially the health of my family members. But I took a few days off and turned my head toward my fiction. It was the best mini-vacation I could possibly have chosen and people seemed to get it more than they understood my performance art.
I spent the time working on a play, a short story, and a competition for a radio-play. Should I be this excited about my dissertation, yes, probably. But a dissertation is writing for other people who judge every word, phrase, and citation. I felt more free while writing. Perhaps the genre made all of the difference. Much of my fiction has an Afrofuturistic origin story. Sometimes I'm just transcribing dreams that allow me room to embellish on paper (computer screen).
The commitment I have to writing is based on on the principle of nommo. A concept from the Dogon of Ancient Mali, who's cosmology begins in space. I suppose it's a worldview I'd rather focus on full time. I keep saying the PhD is getting in the way and it is. So now that my break is over, I've got to land down in Dissertation Land again.
In other news, I've been hipped to a faster FREE way of transcribing: Repeating your interviews into a Google Document with the help of Voice Typing (Agree to use Microphone) under Tools. Check the link below for better instructions.
Of course, it's not perfect. You have to go rrrrreeeeaaaaalllll slow and have crisp word endings. So it sucks when your interviews are of people whose dialect you wish to preserve. At any rate, give it a shot fellow oral historians. I'm going to try to combine it with Express Scribe.
