Back when I was blogging about blogging I waxed rhapsodic about all of the different ways I had available to make a blog entry: various ways to use email, different apps, programs, and so on. I ended up settling on just one method, so my take away from the experience was that it pays to explore different ways of doing things you might otherwise not find motivation for doing. This makes sense for a guy like me, for whom art is accomplished not by the inspiration of an idea, but the inspiration afforded by the materials at hand. I’m a function-follows-form kinda guy.
I’m finding the same type of thing is developing with writing every day. Note that I did not say writing in general- no, I mean specifically the discipline of writing as a daily exercise. I am trying out all different kinds of tools, and I think I may be gravitating to one, now, in particular: Simplenote.
I have all kinds of input devices at my disposal, and normally I don’t worry about getting some writing moved from one device over to my home pc. But I am lazy, and sometimes I let too much time go before collating these disparate notes, and I lose momentum. With Simplenote, I can write on any one of these devices and the work is syched so that everything is always in one virtual place.
This also helps if I am not near enough to my home pc but I want to look at some unfinished story, in a spare moment here or there. I can bring my stuff up no matter what device I have at hand, even someone else’s Internet-connected pc. Last night, for example, I was helping a friend with a school project, and while she worked, I hopped on my wife’s laptop and did the day’s exercise.
FWIW, that’s how “My Illegal Aliens” was started: me, sitting my hallway with one of my devices, trying to think of something to write. Thanks to being able to compose in Simplenote, it was easy for me to bring the story up and finish it the next day.
