A few years ago, when I was working on personal projects as well as freelance writing, I found that I needed to write out a zero draft in a journal before I could compose my thoughts into Word. Then I got the job to work on Mind’s Eye Theatre: The Awakening, and from there I got hired by CCP, so I haven’t had time to use a journal to compose drafts (though I do use it for taking notes and initial brainstorming a lot).

As I started working on a short story, I did some initial writing in a journal, but it ended up not working out — it’s just too slow after years of doing everything with a computer now. But using Microsoft Word is firmly equated with “work” in my mind now, so I was looking for something that was had a few more features than Notepad, but got out of the way more than Word.

I tried using OpenOffice, partially because it’s very Word-like, partially because I’m familiar with it, partially because it’s free, and partially because there’s a plug-in that allows you to quickly upload and download to Google Docs for backup. But as I started getting ideas for “Get Over,” I wasn’t at my home laptop, so I composed my initial ideas in Google Docs with the intention of importing them later into OpenOffice. And next thing I knew, I had written most of the first essay in it. I quickly plowed through the next two over the course of the week. I also found it was easy to dump footnotes into the essays as people brought up other pieces of information.

Then I started dumping information for the nextWAVE game into a Google Doc. And now I’ve continued working on the short story in Google Docs directly, as well as starting to do some initial planning for another project in a Google Doc. And I discovered that it works with Google Gears, so I don’t have to be online to access my latest work (at least on my home laptop).

For some reason, Google Docs hits a sweet spot with me in terms of the creative process. I’m expecting that once I get to the heavy rewrite phase I’ll pull it into OpenOffice or Word, which not only helps me to see it a little differently, but also is more full-featured and fits into the “editor” space in my head better. I still expect I’ll use notebooks to jot down short scenes, brainstorming, ideas and plotting ideas, but I’m moving more and more toward working entirely within my computer creatively.

This might seem like a “duh” moment to some (I know , for example, has been using Google Docs this way for years), but it was an interesting revelation for me as someone who used to really worship paper and journals to find that I’m getting more comfortable with creating inside a computer environment as I grow older.

Of course, between this and moving many of my RSS feeds to Google Reader, this means that Google owns more of my soul.