I'll write more later (gotta get off to work in a minute) but I use MSFT Word now since it's on my laptop and it can go where I go. I've written stuff since I was young and up until the last couple of years I wrote it all on paper. Today, all my notes are on paper, outline, ideas that hit me, characters, time, place, weather, personalities, etc. I don't know why I never got into the habit of putting all of that on the laptop. I guess I've been a scribbler for so long that I can't get out of the habit. I have a small notebook it all goes in that I do keep in the laptop bag...



>I wrote a dozen stories, maybe, and something that may qualify as a novel. Two stories even got published (first one got even paid, the second won a prize I never received). I'm writing, sort of, for 25 years now, and my opus could fit maybe two paperbacks :). I'm slow. Or rather, not so slow to write, but it takes me a looong time - weeks, months, to get back to it.
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>Want to talk about technique, down-to-Earth technique. I wrote only my first story on paper, because it was before I had my first computer (ZX Spectrum, yeah!). Then I didn't have an editor, so I wrote it as comments in a program - 10 REM it was a dark and stormy night...
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>Then I bought an editor, then another machine, then converted via floppies into pure text, took them to work, ran troff on them for formatting (on the VAX), then moved them to WordStar, to Atari's 1st Word, then to Word, then to HTML, and eventually into... HTML in memos. I've had a lot of fun programming my pencils :).
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>Once, after hurricane Isabel, we were without power for 11 days - and guess what, with nothing to do, I took a docket and started adding page after page. Could be that all those years of writing on paper do something to you, you get into the mood or something. I didn't have to change much when I put that on disk.
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>I still write very little on paper. Even my notes are just a few jotted lines - I don't know whether I use a whole sheet of paper a day.
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>So, ok, I've told my side of it, now you tell me yours and let me know if there's a good group therapy for (against?) this.