Today's insights...
Oh, friends, I haven't been feeling well. I don't want to get into the details, but it's a recurrent issue that I'm finally going to seek medical help for... Grrr... but that aside I did want to share that I have started exploring the app Ulysses (writing software to enable writers to become authors, especially with longer form projects, ie a book) and it appears promising! Many many have used it to great effect to organize larger projects, characters, scenes, that they may wish to combine into a longer form, like a novel. That is a goal of mine. I've become pretty facile at writing a 500-word essay or 700 word radio spot that lasts 5 minutes. I have a long history of essay-writing, op-ed writing and other short forms. They are pithy and demand a certain kind of style and usually a willingness to be brutally edited. But the longer form eludes me. I need to give my internal brevity editor a break. Not that we want to let her off the hook. I want to let her roam freely, excising the needless verbiage while allowing the useful, descriptive, evocative prose. Tough call for me. The few forays I've had in it have been fun, challenging, anxiety-provoking....and i hope with practice will prove to be more satisfying in illustrating and coloring in the emotions and scenes I'd like to portray. So this will come with certain permissions: letting the words flow before the brutal edit. Letting the words flow and accepting that sometimes a longer description helps support the story better, and sometimes a shorter one is needed (my usual go-to). So, as one writing professor said: throw up in the morning (let it all out) and clean up in the afternoon (unleash your editor to divide and conquer). Sometimes what you write is not for This Story, but is for another story, waiting to be told.
By the way, I was able to get my accounts to talk to one another and able to get the Ulysses s/w to open up across devices. What a sweat! Still more to learn, but I can see the advantage to using such tools, if for nothing more than to organize my thoughts. And capturing thoughts, so they are not lost.
More when I feel more human. Cheers.