Writing

I've always written stories on computer. My earliest were saved on 5 1/4" floppy disks that fed into one of the two drives for my Apple 2e. With a green screen. In a closet on the second floor of my childhood home with no AC. Even before global warming, summers were hot and muggy. But there was something about writing in dark, with only the glow of the green screen, that let my imagination run free. Tech advanced, and I upgraded. Switching over to a PC with 16 whole colors and 1 MB of RAM was a revelation.

Text editors went from whatever Apple had in the 80s, to Microsoft Works, to Word, Open Office, through Jarte for my under powered mini-laptop, and back to Word as my hardware, and my phone, were able to handle the memory needs.

Now I write on a fairly new gaming computer or on my phone when traveling. An external monitor and keyboard gives me the feel of a laptop for far less weight.

I've tried dictation, but I can't make it work for me. Something about my voice, too many words are missed and punctuation is a pain. I've written some things by hand, but for long works, I want that feel of the keys. I gave up cursive as soon as I could and now my handwriting is in a font best called "lazy draftsman", a mix of all caps printing gleaned from years of reading construction blueprints.

Writing on computer comes with a much needed spell check, and for me, warnings about impending comma splices. The grammar checker in Word has gotten much better over the years.

I'm a panster as a writer, which means I don't outline and probably don't know what my characters are going to do until they do it. It's good for allowing the story to head in a unique and interesting direction, but it means you need to keep the history in your head so you aren't having to make major revisions to early parts of the story. I also really like the world building of writing speculative fiction. What will things be like hundreds, if not thousands, of years from now.

The other tools I use are Fractal Terrains for building out a whole planet. Excel for timelines. And I draw. Could be a sketch of a place or some of the indigenous critters to my world. Forcing myself to visualize them in enough detail to draw, forces me to think about the environmental factors that would make them happen.