Yikes! Looks like I'm the odd duck here. I have habits. Used to have other habits, and thought *they* were the way to do things...
So: I only write at the machine. Used to have two monitors, now I just use one big monitor. I wish it were bigger: I've got half a dozen windows open when I'm writing a poem. Dictionaries, thesauri, rhyming dictionaries, points of research, it's an entire datastream. Need music playing, the music can't have words. Has to be done on a private, hidden blog: the actual inscribing of the text has to be as far away as possible from me. The blog is hosted in California.
I never have ideas. There's nothing to jot down for later. My mind is nearly always completely blank. Like those old jokes about a polar bear eating marshmallows in a snowstorm. There's nothing in there: it's just a fogbank. So I sit down to write, but only because I've been told: "No soup for you until you write a poem!" I can't take more than 30 minutes. I just don't have the attention span. And once I click 'save', it's not mine anymore. I can look at it the next day, and say "wow, who wrote that?"
I admire people who can hold ideas in their head. I just can't do it. And I admire people who can think, and ponder, and consider. I can't do that either. But mostly, I admire people who can revise, reframe, work on something for more than half an hour. I'm hopeless at that.
Oh, and the reason people are getting bounced out of the survey isn't nefarious. It's because of the free survey hosting site Eric used. There are much better hosts out there, but they cost actual money, and I don't think the project's funded.
Thanks,
Bill