My Writing Tools and Process

My Writing Tools and Process

I've finally started trying to write a book about my life, perspectives, disjointed philosophies, and guidance for my children, a large amount of which provides my suggestions for avoiding dangers with modern technology. This article describes my tools and general process.

Originally published to: https://deliverystack.net/2025/11/09/my-writing-tools-and-process/

I still really prefer older versions of Microsoft Word as a writing environment, but I'm committed to moving off of big tech to the extent possible. For significant writing efforts, I use LibreOffice Writer.

For various reasons, I've decided to store the content as markdown. I was thinking about writing a Rust program or some shell script or something to convert from Word or Writer binary file formats to markdown, and I'm gathering requirements for that logic. For now, I have enough experience with markdown and need few enough simple formatting features that, so I just edit markdown files directly. This helps me focus on content, not formatting, and makes it easy to embed resources such as external links. I try to avoid embedding links in paragraphs. Internal links and references to images are a bigger challenge, since I sometimes paste the rendered markdown into blog posts of early drafts, which should only reference external URLs. So I include //TODOs for the blog and then update those in the .md files after I copy the formatted markdown to the blog.

I also use VSCodium, which has a good file tree browser, a visualizer for markdown that makes it easy to paste formatting content into my blog on WordPress, and other useful features such as search across files and git integration.

I configured something that makes it easier to open .md files in Writer:

I created a local git project for this effort. Using VSCodium, I periodically check everything into a github repository that is currently private. I know that the AI companies will eventually read this content anyway, so I'm not concerned about Microsoft training their AI on it now, but as part of my migration off of big tech, I hope to eventually move off of github. For now, using github has a few advantages:

I installed Vale in an attempt to improve my writing in VSCodium. Vale works on the command line, but not in VSCodium, and I gave up after some time. This is where VSCodium and Writer both make me miss Word's spellcheck and grammar suggestions, which were familiar to me after decades of use and I knew how to easily configure my preferences. I'll try to at least spellcheck in Writer sometimes.

I try to keep the files relatively small and the directory structure relatively fluid. I am not really working on things like a table of contents or even heading levels yet - at this point I'm mostly just gathering content.

Sometimes I paste early drafts into blog posts, publish those, and promote them on linkedin.

One folder in the project is for daily journal entries, which I'm calling steam of consciousness. Within this folder, I create a folder for each year and within that a folder for each month, and then in those folders, markdown files for each each day that I have time to do any significant writing. Throughout the day, I write notes into this file, including //TODOs and draft material that I might later move into separate files. At the end of the day, I publish the journal entry to my blog and then promote it on LinkedIn.

I might start reading some of these blog entries aloud and publishing them as YouTube videos, as some people prefer to absorb audio instead of text, and this could be a nice thing to leave behind for my children. I may need to use Audacity to convert the raw audio files for YouTube.

At night, I use the voice/memo recorder app on my phone to track my thoughts, and then process those into text the following morning.