As my loyal readers know, I recently interviewed George R.R. Martin for SCI FI Wire. What you don’t know is that while I normally do email interviews, GRRM dislikes them and preferred to do a phone interview.  So off I went into new territory. 

Not being able to transcribe a conversation as I conduct one word for word, and not having a perfect memory, I figured I better record the call.  Which I did, but my recording plan didn’t turn out to be too smart–I was using my Pocket PC to record the interview, holding it up to my cell phone speaker and trying to listen at the same time. Didn’t work great, but I couldn’t think how else to do it with the technologies I had at hand. I downloaded a program for my PC (Call Corder) that’s supposed to record calls for you, but I couldn’t figure out how to use it. And by couldn’t figure out how to use it, I mean, couldn’t even figure out how to set it up, get it to recognize my modem, etc.  Pretty pathetic.

I need to find *something* though.  I have another phone interview in about a week and a half. I won’t say who with now, but maybe I’ll post about it later to report how it went.

But man, I really don’t like the phone interview. I get unspeakably nervous beforehand, so I waste a lot of time preparing and re-preparing my materials, watching the clock, etc. And then once it’s done, you have to spend all that extra time transcribing it, and it’s somewhat frustrating if you can’t make out exactly what he says (luckily that didn’t happen enough to matter for my GRRM interview).

See, what I need is to get that recording program working, and then get one of those voice-to-text programs to transcribe it for me; I’m sure such a thing would require some clean-up and editing, but it would probably be easier than trying to transcribe the whole thing manually.

Anyone have any suggestions?