Recently at my writing group someone mentioned they were having a lot of difficulty translating their story notes into an outline and asked for help. As we started talking to him, we found out that he’d bought a beautiful, expensive notebook into which he planned to write his thoughts, as soon as his thoughts were together. The advice of the group coordinator could be summed up as: “Get rid of your pretty notebook that you’re afraid to write in, because it’s getting in the way. Buy a cheap yellow legal pad and WRITE.”<\/p>\n
SO, what I’ve found? As cheap and disposable as blog entries are, they’re still aimed towards recording complete thoughts. If you can’t finish a thought, or it needs to be refined, blogging (for me) gets in the way, because my thoughts drift backward into the distance and I never finish them.<\/p>\n
THAT is why I’ve reinitialized the wiki<\/a> over at dresan.net<\/a>. A wiki’s pages are automagically editable and suitable for recording incomplete, incoherent, half-completed thoughts that can be edited, updated, or reorganized as need be. My blog was becoming my pristine notebook; so time to whip out something sloppy that I can just write on, regardless of how well formed my thoughts are.<\/p>\n So, for example, when I’m trying to get SLIME working for XEmacs on Windows with CLISP running on Cygwin, and I haven’t quite figured it out yet, I can just create a wiki entry on dresan.net about Slime<\/a> which captures my current thoughts, crossreferenced with XEmacs and CLISP and Cygwin which I can edit and refine to my heart’s content. <\/p>\n