[DanielBMarkham]

Thank you for your essay.

Apologies for being Mr. Negative Guy. I hate folks that do that.

But as somebody who is extremely technical and loves tools and coding, moving to long-form fiction writing, I find that every minute I spend on tooling is _not_ writing. It might be good and necessary, and tools can do some amazing things, but it's not writing.

Fiction writing, at least for me, is a bit of organized struggle with my subconscious. My brain would much rather be coding, writing build scripts, creating a huge cross-layered tagging system, commenting on HN, and so forth. That's because "struggling with your subconscious" is not something we teach or emphasize.

There's a really strong allure of tools, process, and tooling that calls to us when our minds don't want to do the work. Buy the product, learn the tagging, follow the recipe, etc -- it's all about hey, don't do the work, have the tool do the work. Don't be a dummy!

But since I don't know the work myself until I create it, there's no tool or process that's going to do anything but distract. Love my tools, spent a lot of time with them. I spent all day yesterday re-creating and re-factoring my build pipeline from markdown to about a dozen different formats. But that wasn't work, not really. It was avoiding work by doing (hopefully) very useful tangential things.

I'd love to write a tooling/process essay or book. I will not. This is why.