This is possibly the second blog post for me today. I tried out Adobe InCopy when I wrote this morning (meh…), so this time around I am using draftin.com to write something. Again, I’m not sure how this is an improvement over writing with MSWord or with Google Docs.

I do seem to be having trouble focusing just now, so I’m not sure if I’m going to make the 500-word minimum. Really, it shouldn’t be so hard to pump out 500 words when there is no great pressure to do so. But, again, I feel like I’m moving backward, getting more wrapped up in what I think people will say if only they were reading the shit I produce. This is why I have always preferred to write by hand and then transfer it to computer rather than the more streamlined type-as-you-write style. I wish I could type without feeling that what I was typing is visible to the larger world - at least this presents a paranoiac fantasy.

Dag nabbit, this writing app doesn’t have a word count function. How can they not have a word count function?

I forgot where I was going with all of this. I can’t get my head straight until I sort out the word count… Oh, there it is! It’s faint, but it’s displayed lower right. I wish there was a way to turn it up, but I haven’t seen anything yet.

Ah, fuck it.

Now it’s a few days later and I am just coming back to finish this post. Like I said before, I’m not sure this is the best writing platform for me, but I’ll stick with it for a while. In terms of professional writing, nothing yet comes close to using MSWord with the Endnote reference software. Maybe this online writing platform will be good for first draft writing, but the more fiddly stuff that comes after really takes a robust system like Word and Endnote to be productive. I need to get back to typing up notes the way I used to.

The freewriting blog I wrote for a while was a great tool for learning how to better write at the computer keyboard, but sometimes I forget myself and write like there is someone over my shoulder reading as I write. Over the months I have been actively writing this blog I have gotten much more assertive in my author’s voice, sounding like myself in conversation, but arguing more clearly than myself in conversational mode. One of the nice things about writing is that you can trim out all the stuff you absolutely don’t need long before the document is presented as completed, and therefore a public utterance. Going off the top of my head, my language is full of unnecessary filler, but the flow of ideas is what is most important from the frantic freewriting style. The editing process, though, requires a much more deliberate approach to language, moving things about, correcting things, and trimming mercilessly.

I think I’ve reached 500 words. Let me post what I have and move on.