It's far too easy, these days, with two little kids and a day job that sometimes bleeds into the evenings after the kids have gone to bed, to forgo the daily writing ritual.

And when you (meaning me, in this case) sit down at the computer, it's far too easy to get distracted by email, browsing the web (I'm looking at you, RedRoom.com) under the guise of research, or information gathering, or under no guise at all. In the past, I've created a new user on my Mac with a very spare workspace, with only the essentials sitting right in front of my eyes, like Word and... well, that's it. A web browser for emergency research. This approach employed the honor system with myself. A risky proposition, at best. I got some writing done, but the sheer effort involved in logging in as another user and firing up proved too tedious for those moments when I just wanted to jot something down.

A second approach was to get a typewriter and write the way I used to write papers; with lots of noises and satisfactory thunking and clacking and ringing. The major obstacle with this approach was my dear, sweet wife, for whom I sometimes shovel the driveway, in the winter. She didn't see the need for yet another piece of bulky equipment around the house. And I really can't argue with that.

But then, one day a few years ago, now, I found a little bit of writing by Khoi Vinh (design directory for the New York Times.com) about a writing environment he envisioned in which you could only write forward: no leaping around like word processors allow you to do. I had to agree. With a word processor, it's way too easy to fall into that trap of editing and re-editing while you're in the middle of something. Which, for me, anyway, would bog me down, bringing the joy of actually writing the story down to a screeching halt, as it became more about the revision than the writing, before the writing even got started.

Unfortunately, Khoi's vision was just that: a vision. So I decided to do something about that (which, in and of itself was a form of procrastination... but it was a form of procrastination to help all those other writers out there... to be free... in a way I never was... Still, procrastination, big-time.).

At any rate, a week or so later, and I had this: Writer.app. It was useful, for me, anyway.

What it is is a word processor, but quite possibly the lamest one ever created, intentionally. You can write in it... and you can keep writing forward, and you can go back and strike things out, but there's no cut and paste and shifting around. Once you've written something, it's committed to the screen, and there's no tweaking it or tinkering. It can also optionally shut off your network connection, hide your desktop behind a darkening screen, and, when you're ready for it, export it to Word, Mellel, Tinderbox, or just a text file to get editing. It's for Macs only (unfortunately or not).

I've found it to be freeing, personally. You don't worry about what will inevitably come next: the big editing session. Instead you focus on what excites you about writing in the first place (well, me, anyway), and that is telling the story. A story, if it turns out to be different than you'd envisioned.

This isn't necessarily a post to implore you to use this software I wrote (it's free, it's not really doing anything, financially, for me), but it's just something that I've found really useful, for my writing (and hitting deadlines, something which is... slightly foreign, to me).