Hey! First of all, I'm honoured that CWKB is turning up in your dreams—though I'm sorry to say that no ambitious metrical and tonal shift is coming in Book XI!
I do use dictation software: I use the 2012 version of Dragon, since (1) it's what I could get my hands on, and (2) I prefer the higher speed for the speak-read-correct loop that running an older version offers. It is, of course, not very good: I've never met really impressive dictation software, and I've a certain amount of scepticism about the idea that that's possible.
But I find it usable. In part, that's because I'm transcribing rather than composing. I can more-or-less hammer out prose by dictation, but composing poetry directly in dictation software presents many challenges. (For any third parties reading who haven't tried this, composing verse in dictation feels very different to composing verse aloud, which most people can do given practice.)
Another advantage I have is that though Taru names differ a great deal from any met in real life, they always use two real English words, often very basic normal words. I've had to teach Dragon some obscurities and some made-up (well, resurrected) things, like Taru. And then in the outermost ring of less- or non-familiar words, there are things which I must either spell in the NATO phonetic alphabet, or give up and type by hand. I think of the limited typed corrections that I have to do as something on which I'm spending my limited budget of hand activity.
None of this is easy. I first learned to write by dictation for my doctoral thesis eleven or twelve years ago, and the process probably involved three to six months of rough cognitive struggle. Somehow, dictation seems to engage different parts of the brain, or something. Given the choice, I would probably prefer to go back to typing long-form. But my hands are at present not giving me the choice.
I like to write in pen, ideally on A4 lined sheets, which leave enough space in the margin—if you're writing English five-beat lines, at least—to edit and leave notes. For alliterative verse, I normally double-space my lines, because I find myself making more edits on the page in AV. When I'm travelling, I write in A5 notebooks. I've attached some pictures to this post! (And I should apologise for my handwriting…)
