I thought I should report back on my dictating efforts.  
The best thing I can say about it is that DOES make copy-typing faster.  Copy-typing of any kind is gruelling, though:  cue days of aches and pains in back and neck, as I stare fixedly at the screen, typing rather badly.  (Contrary to what one might believe, typing doesn't get any better the more you do it.)  It was painful stuff.  All the joy of handwriting a short story were nullified by the sheer utter tedium of having to convert it onto the screen.
Several small factors made it harder:  my headphones weren't long quite long enough to place my tablet where I wanted it (yes, hello, iPod people, why are your headphones so damn short);  there was also quite an irritating break in typing every time I had to physically stop the playback (by touching the screen's pause button) and often I'd miss.  
You try hitting a half-centimetre circle with a pinkie and see how accurate you are.
So it was slow-going and laborious.  It would have been lovely to have one of those dictaphone things with a foot pedal but when I priced them on Amazon, they cost nothing less than a fortune.
However, at long last the short story was transferred to the screen where I could edit it.  There's nothing quite likely slowly reading your work out loud and then even more slowly retyping it to realise just how bad it is.  I had an awful lot of work to do to get it up to scratch.
It's odd that a piece of work seems so brilliant when you're writing it and that afterwards, when you begin editing it, you realise what crap it is.  The creative process is divine.  The editing process is hell.  How feeble we are at reproducing our imaginations on the page.
Or, at least, I am.
I've just finished writing a second short story by hand (another fantasy tale, part of the same universe).  This one was much harder.  Two thirds of the way through, I had to ditch everything and start again.  This time I'm far more aware of its shortcomings and am actually looking forward to editing it to fix it up.  It also has a plot hole which I don't seem able to fix.  
Perhaps all I need to do is distract the reader.  Heh heh heh.

I realised this week that I can at best be described a late bloomer.  The fact that I haven't actually bloomed yet makes it later still!  After a horrible week, full of cruel disappointments and an appalling writing crisis, telling myself that I am still to bloom is about all I've got to keep me going.  It's the positive flip-side to "total failure."  It also helps (though not much) to alleviate the sickening green envy I feel when twenty-two-year-olds win major writing awards and publication deals because, obviously, I wanted to be that 22 y.o. when I was 22.  I wanted to be a child star.  And the rather lonely, neglected, nightmare-filled child inside me STILL wants to be that star.
So I'm having to placate myself with the fact that many extremely successful writers only found that success very late.  I'm sure I'm not the first "ageing" writer to tell myself, again and again, like a mantra "late bloomer, late bloomer, late bloomer....." in the vague hope that it will cheer me up. 
After all, don't late bloomers bloom the most beautifully?
​
Looking for "late bloomer" quotes online made me raise several eyebrows, though.  Those quotes by people who say they only bloomed in their twenties........how is that late blooming?  From my positively ancient viewpoint, anything below 40 to me is still spring-chicken country.  
Wikipedia got it right, though;  however, did they have to put "child prodigy" at the top of their "see also" list - right under late blooming authors??!  
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_bloomer#Writing

I've just finished writing a short story - by hand, in ten days!  This was QUITE unplanned.  
I was already working on a new Exodus Sequence novelette, which was turning into a huge piece, so huge I had to split it in two.  I had begun the second part but my writing seemed to slow down to a crawl.  It was hard to concentrate on something that was, essentially, just too hard.  I think I was perhaps being over-ambitious!
Also, life was getting in the way.
So I did something I've never done before:  I took a few pieces of paper with me to Kew, sat in a window overlooking the lake and, while waiting for my coffee (they needed to pick the beans, so it was taking a while.....), I began to make notes.  I wrote another paragraph for the Flash Fiction piece I was working on.  And then made some notes for the series of short stories I wanted to write inspired by the novel I wrote last year (and for which I'm currently trying to find an agent.)
Before I knew it, I had already written a page.  
The next day I sat down and wrote a few more.  Then more.  I sat in front of my computer, though it was turned off, and just wrote and wrote and wrote, often for longer than I would usually write when typing, and producing many more words in a sitting.  The story unfolded easily, surprising me on the way.  Once you read it, you'd think I'd spent an age planning it.  Even the research was fun and I wrote with confidence, never second-guessing myself.  It helped also not to go back and edit each day because that really slows me down too.  And once I'd worked out vaguely how many words I was writing per page (around 500), it meant I could judge the length of the story and ensure it didn't turn into an over-long saga, which is what I was trying to avoid.  At a rough guess, I'd say it's about 10 000 words, which is what I was aiming at.  For me, that's short.
But better than all of this is the sheer utter joyful feeling of CREATING.  It was just wonderful to be able to produce this work.  It removed me from the day-to-day tribulations of Life long enough to improve my mood and give me the strength to go back to it.  As a writer, I sometimes think I only get to spend about 2% of my life actually writing;  the rest is just coping.  At least writing (when it goes well) gives one something to live for.

I now sit with 24 pages of my handwriting, which looks neat enough but is actually quite a trial to copy-type.  (I've been through this before.)  So I've come up with a brilliant idea:  using a dictaphone and audio-typing.  I downloaded one (there are zillions available, it seems) onto my tablet and have already recorded the first few pages.  Each recording is only a thousand words or so (two written pages) and about 6 minutes long.  This makes more confrontable blocks to type.  I absolutely can't stand the sound of my voice but just have to get over that.  
Will let you know how it goes!
​

Have come to conclusion that I'm an enormously delicate flower of a person.  This is not a good thing to be in this world.  Outside the orcs are cutting down the trees and I can hear them (the trees) screaming in pain, all the leaf buds dying, all that life extinguished by an evil fucker's chainsaw.  I put on some pretty music and tried to write my not-very-good story but it's quite entertaining (to write, anyway).......only to have my computer tell me there was no more storage space.
Was it utterly nuts???? Brand new computer, with about one millimetre of blue used on the C drive.  Something to do with OneDrive, whatever the hell that is.  And do you think I could contact Microsoft???!!!  I was howling with frustration, blinded by tears, when finally I worked out I had to click on the "disabled" persons thing (I don't understand this - they only talk to disabled people, everyone else gets a crap email?)  Anyway, since my feet are in agony, my arthritis hurts, I have had terrible earache for two weeks and am thus partially deaf, I figured I was disabled enough.  Also, I'm a hypochondriac, have agoraphobia, claustrophobia, suffer from severe bouts of depression, and frightened of people, germs, dirt and taxes.....so I figure this makes me quite disabled too.
Or, at best, a crushed petal of a person, who cries at the most minor of life's challenges.
Anyway, totally fab Microsoft guy took remote access of my computer, got rid of stupid OneDrive which I don't need and I'm back in action.
A Very Big Writer's Tip:  if this happens and you think you're going to lose what you just wrote, copy and paste it as fast as possible into an email.  I did that and thank God I did because the last paragraph I had written vanished.  Easily retrievable from gmail.  Hoorah.
Think I'd better go and have lunch before I die of starvation.

Out the.  Out of the.  Out the.  Out of the.  Out of mind.  Out the mind.  Out the.  Out of the.  Mind.  Out of.  Going.  Out the.  Out of the.  Out of mind.  Out of the mind.  Going out the mind.  Going out of the mind.  Out the.  Out of the.  Mind.  Going.  Gone.
I finally got around to doing the corrections I needed to do on my new novel (the one I wrote last year......currently being ignored by several agents).  They weren't particularly major things, for example, I used the word "highway" instead of "motorway".  The former is not British, apparently.  Growing up in South Africa, my English is littered with what appear to be Americanisms.  Decades of living in the UK seem to have made no difference.  Once the idiom is grooved in, you're stuck with it.
One of my (very well educated, intelligent and sharp-eyed) beta readers spotted that I had left out the "of" in thousands of cases:  "out of the" instead of "out the."  Horrified at my bad English, I rushed off and changed them all.  But as I was changing them, I began to have serious doubts.  In many cases, it didn't scan properly.  It didn't sound right to my ear.  It seemed clumsy.  More importantly, it was contrary to the way I "think."  While I'm willing to Anglicize highway, "out of the" - in many cases - just seemed wrong.
So I asked a friend with decades of editing experience and he said he'd had the same problem when editing and had at first changed them all to "out of the", only to realise that it must be an Americanism.  THIS I can understand.  South African English (at least at the time that I grew up there) is full of Americanisms, the most obvious reason being that during the Equity ban, we got to hear no good English i.e. all BBC programmes were banned and those that did turn up on TV were dubbed into Afrikaans, which was excruciating.   
So today I changed all the instances of "out of the" back to "out the."  It was enough to drive anyone bonkers!  Obviously I still say "out of the blue" but I don't say "she looked out of the window" or "she walked out of the door".  I checked online to see what others make of this problem and one person insists you can't have anyone falling out of a tree or even out a tree - they fall OFF a tree.  I think all the people I know who have fallen out of trees would probably disagree with that!
In the end, I decided to go with consistency.  And fluidity.  And the familiar.  After all, it's not a work of high literature - other readers didn't notice the lack of "of" at all!!

Nothing is quite as daunting - for a writer - when you realise the story you're writing has failed.  What to do ... what to do ...  First I cried a lot, then just felt REALLY depressed.  Then my sore foot (that hasn't been sore for nearly two years) started hurting again and that made me even more depressed.
Then in the bath - by chance - I heard a quote by Douglas Adams on the radio.  Naturally, after a long and protracted Google search, I can't find the quote.  It had to do with writing.  It had to do, more specifically, with editing.  It made me realise that no matter how crap the story is that you are writing, it can be edited into something spectacular.  It emphasised the need to get something down on a page - ANYTHING down on a page - so that you can actually edit it.  
I live by this advice.  "You can't flesh out the skeleton unless you actually have a skeleton to flesh out" is my version of this.  But I have another piece of advice that has helped me over the years:  if a story grinds to a halt, it's because there's something wrong earlier on.
In the quote, Douglas Adams quite rightly pointed out that quite often you only work out what is going to happen in a story when you get there and that is what changes the earlier bits.  This is SO true:  I've had characters develop on the page which means, often, that earlier pages are just wrong as the characters are now "out of character" as it were.  Often elements of the story only reveal themselves when you're a long way down the road, thus changing things that went before.  Basically this boils down to your imagination only getting into gear once you really know the story and have written thousands of words, most of which you're now going to have to change. 
So I have a choice here:  to keep grinding on even though I know everything I'm writing is wrong and the ending can't actually happen because it hasn't been set up properly (or at all.)
Or I could just make a thousand notes and start editing now.
I know I've got a good story here.  It's a unique idea.  Original ideas are also worth pursuing.  I may just have failed to develop the idea properly.  Also, I find that I'm wandering off on tangents that stop any action from occurring.  This is what I wrote in my notes:
"This story is not going well.  It hasn't, er, evolved* the way I wanted it to.  Too much talking, explaining, flashbacking and almost no action at all.  You've been sidetracked by creating the universe and have forgotten the story, of which there is almost NOTHING."
I like the way I talk to myself crossly.
So I may take a break from this for a few days, get some space, go for a walk (damn sore foot notwithstanding) and then get on with those editing notes.
Then edit.  Although in this case I think it's going to be a major rewrite.

* An irony, since the story is called Evolved.

My radio alarm woke me up on Friday with a story about the discovery that Neanderthal Man was capable of art 125 000 years ago.  As I'm currently writing a novelette about prehistoric Man, this was of immense interest.  Suddenly everyone was interested in the exact subject I've been [loosely] researching for weeks.  
Later that morning, I was doing just exactly that - researching ancient man and trying to figure out what he ate off (if anything).  I found an interesting article that quoted something by a woman who was easy to remember.  She had scarlet hair, an undercut, several piercings and black-rimmed glasses.  At the time I thought she was a scientist but I think she writes about science, which is a different thing.  Anyway, I thought her theories were interesting and moved on, not giving it much thought.
Until later that same day, I opened up the SFX that drops through the letterbox on regular intervals - and found an interview with her!  Same picture and everything, thus instantly recognisable.  (Also, I recognised the title of a book she's written Scatter, Adapt, and Remember:  How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.  It's not a title you forget easily.)
TWO coincidences in one day?
Weird!
I found this picture of someone's idea of Neanderthal Woman;  a tad goddess-like, perhaps?

I dreamt last night that the alarm didn't go off and I was only woken up at 7.15 which was the time we were supposed to leave to go to the station - much panic in the dream, which - weirdly - took place in the house where I grew up.  As it transpired, I set my tablet alarm to 6.05.......for Monday to Friday.  Aaargh!  So life imitated dreamland as my daughter burst in and shouted at me to get up at 6.25.  We made it, though, and off she went to a university taster-type day at ten to eight with just a flutter of nerves.
As it was such a beautiful morning, I walked home from Waterloo station.  The sun was just coming up behind some or other hideous building near the South Bank and the view from Waterloo Bridge was spectacular. The water looked like metal and a soft, golden light touched all the buildings.  The air was quite fresh but for the first time in a long time, I noticed how foul the car exhaust fumes were whenever a vehicle sped past.  In London, one is so used to the general stink that it goes unnoticed most of the time (though not in summer when one generally chokes to death on the sidewalk.)  Had a coffee to try and wake up and then strolled back to Bloomsbury, circling Russell Square several times.
What a lovely morning!
And an excellent time to do some work.  The first draft of my new Exodus Sequence story is going rather badly - lurching along with zero character development, crap descriptions and fading plot lines but for once I'm not too concerned.  I just need to get words down on the page to get my confidence back.  And then I'll attack it and fix it up.  One day.

I'm getting through the weekend in a blanket.  The central heating started to fail last weekend, refusing to go on despite the fact that the thermostat claimed the flat was cold enough.  The whole on-off control panel refused to work.  And it was only installed at the end of September.  By Friday, it had given up the ghost entirely.  Two rather small oil heaters (chewing up electricity) just aren't helping.  One of them is rather old and too heavy to move about, while the brand new one (which I couldn't afford) takes all day to change the temperature of a room from freezing to slightly cold.  I began shutting doors yesterday and by evening, the kitchen was finally warm.  It was gloomy yesterday too, with pinpricks of sleet coming down:  very depressing.  I am so unbelievably sick and tired of trudging around the squares in of inner London so didn't want to venture forth either, even though going for a walk in the cold is the only way to warm up.
This morning has dawned bright and sunny - and very cold.  But at least it feels more cheerful and my morning sprint-walk around Russell Square meant I warmed up quite nicely.
What do you do when it's too cold in your house to exist?  Go out?  I'd love to go to the shops or go out for coffee or something......but I've run out of money.  My entire salary vanished in the first week of February:  had to buy a dehumidifier as the mould and damp suddenly began to colonise previously unaffected rooms in spectacular fashion (it's been a gargantuan problem in other rooms for years.)  And then that urgently-required heater.  It cost bloody £65 but is just too small to cope.  Wish I could have afforded the bigger one.
Sigh.  Don't ask about getting the central heating fixed.  That's another blog that involves a long rant about Camden Council.  The less said about them the better (although can I just mention to someone somewhere that "24 hours emergency" does not equal FIVE DAYS to get a repairman out.  Hello?  Maths, anyone?)
Time to do some writing.  My heating pad has warmed up my back nicely and the sun is pouring in through the windows.  It's Sunday morning, probably the best morning of the week.
As for that thermostat: it has finally decided that it's 15C, having being stuck on 18 since September.  

Even on the coldest day in January, Pigeon Man never wears a coat.  In summer, he wears a black T-shirt;  when it's colder, the sleeves are longer.  When it's very cold, he might stoop to a second layer.  Today under his black sweatshirt, I noticed a red T-shirt peeping out;  his black one was (hopefully) in the wash.
The pigeons adore him.  They must know him, though how, I can't be sure.  Does he smell of pigeon?  He smells but it's mostly BO.  His long, wavy, grey hair hasn't been washed for decades, possibly;  he also has a long grey beard, so that he resembles a slightly grubby wizard.  He has "local character" stamped all over him.  When the pigeons land on him, he stands very still, though I've seen them cling on happily if he strolls about on the grass, his arms outstretched.  They land on his head, shoulders, arms and flock about him with much flapping of wings.  This morning I heard him say, "hello, my little friends."  It was rather sweet.  He's utterly harmless and I don't think he has lost a single marble.  He's not a tramp or a nutter and he looks as if he might actually be capable of interesting conversation.
Sometimes accompanying him is a small woman in a smart but very old suit, whom I presume is his wife/partner.  I've seen them in the supermarket together on occasion, reduced to the ordinary but not ordinary at all:  he has a distance in his eyes that makes me think he suffers in a supermarket the way I do.  Too many people, too much noise, too bright, too grasping.  As I've recently started talking to the squirrels I feed, I suspect that I may be heading in the same direction as Pigeon Man.......though hopefully better groomed and washed, and possibly better at pretending to be normal.  It goes without saying that the squirrels love him too, and climb up all over him.
There are several characters in Bloomsbury whom I see around the squares, feeding the wildlife.  I once had a conversation with a tall woman who carries several shopping bags around with her, resembling - slightly - a bag lady, though she's certainly not homeless.  She has rather wild white hair that she dyes an occasional pinky-orange.  I once had a long conversation with her on a smaller square where she was feeding enormous walnuts to squirrels.  She called them "darling" (I call them "sweetie") and they knew her well enough to rummage about in her bags looking for the nuts they knew were there.  What surprised me about her was the poshness of her accent.  She was clearly educated and intelligent and made me think of that phrase "gentile poverty."  We discussed squirrels and trees and Kew and though she told me her name, I've since forgotten it.
She's also friends with Pigeon Man and if I was a better person, I would get to know them more.  I wonder what they talk about?  Squirrels?  Nuts?  Pigeons?  Trees?  The meaning of life?