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FYI.
This is how messy my home office becomes when I’m DEEP into significant writing against a deadline—piles of papers on various surfaces and the floor—typically there are multiple stacks of books—each pile has meaning to me during the process. There are constant shifts between my Windows PC and my iPad Pro. This is the carnage after writing over 3 days and producing 12 pages of double-spaced rough draft text for part of an APA amicus brief for a court case involving the diagnosis of an individual with an intellectual disability.
The room was much more cluttered with many book stacks and paper piles this summer when it took me approximately 3 months to write the Foreword for Flanagan et al.‘s (2026) Essentials of Cross-Battery Assessment and XBASS, 4th edition. The submitted draft was 43+ double-spaced pages—in print, with very small font, it was 14 pages. It was a chapter-length foreword. 😀 It is how I role when I write.
My creative and professional writing is typically a very non-linear, ill-structured, messy process, at times cycling between states of frustration followed by a flurry of rapid flow states of exhilaration—much like my mind, that is constantly shifting between the central executive and very active default brain networks—-a very busy “unquiet mind” often “touched with fire”.
I couldn’t do it without computer-based word processing and some other special text-related apps I use. Good thing I can close the door until all is done.
How about others?
