This postToday I saw a blog post on writing a book in Google Docs. Interesting. One of the things that stuck out to me was the <div> hack to rein in the line lengths — that’s one of the things that has bothered me about Google Docs, and yet somehow I never thought to just edit the HTML. It’s brilliant.
In general, though, I write in a text editor — TextMate if I’m on my Mac, Wordpad if I’m on Windows, Vim if I’m on Linux. I can’t use anything too bulky or too slow, anything that gets in the way. And so text editors are the way to go. While I do think I’ll start making backups of my writing in Google Docs (right now I backup to my personal wiki, which also works, but redundancy is a very good thing), I don’t really see myself doing the actual writing there. Still too much of a barrier. (Yeah, I’m weird. ;))
Anyway, I’ve mentioned this at least twice before, but I really, really, really love writing in lightweight text editors. It makes me happy. Not only is it fast, but it’s portable — pretty much every computer on earth has at least a text editor.
But today in the lunch line I used a more portable system: the notebook. (Paper, that is. :)) I was standing there mulling over this new play I’m writing (and I finally snagged an idea last night and have some direction with it), when I realized that nothing was stopping me from drafting a page or two of dialogue while I was there. So I did. And it was great. I love being a writer. :)
Hmm, I’m not sure if this post is worth posting — my brain shut down around five o’clock this afternoon — but whatever. I’ll have a review of Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl up in a day or two when I finish reading it.
