Yes. You are right. I am a stream of consciousness style writer. At least that’s the first stage of my writing. Because sometimes that’s what I need to do to get some words down on paper into this or that electronical beastie. If you dare to read anything I have written at the stream of consciousness stage of my writing, I can’t help you. If you think it is a bunch of gibberish with double negatives and dangling participles (whatever the heck those are) and mangled clauses of various sorts, well, you are RIGHT! And I can’t help you. If I have emailed you and written a fuschia-highlighted disclaimer right at the top of the document and shouted to the heavens above that this draft of my writing is a BUNCH of CRAP and you choose to read it ANYWAY, I can’t help you. You were warned. It does no good for you to critique my convoluted confusing writing “style”. It is a waste of your time and mine and it makes me feel bad to boot.

Because I haven’t started the “process” stage of my writing yet. I’m not even exactly sure what “process writing” is. If I have it right (from when the beach urchins were learning to write stories and things in grade school), it means writing a rough draft, then editing it again and again, removing the double negatives and the dangling participles and the mangled clauses of various sorts. Eviscerating it until all of the extraneous crap, extra words and sentences and tangentially-related stuff, has been dropped on the floor.

I am not a trained writer. I was a music major who fell headfirst into the IT business many moons ago. I am not in competition with journalists or authors of books. Writing has been an important tool at every job I have ever had but it has never been the only tool. In my current life as a web application user interface designer, I have to be able to write coherent documents telling others how to build and test the designs I am involved in creating. These are long, complex documents and getting them to a polished state with clear, coherent explanations can take a long time (and an intimate relationship with MS Word). Make no mistake, I need input on my writing. Do I have this or that detail wrong? Is this or that sentence/paragraph/diagram/table confusing? But style? Oh man. Please do not try to critique my writing until *I* can at least understand what I wrote.

Now, all bets are off if you are talking about my blahg! There are days that the GG can’t even understand what I wrote and he lives here. I am blahgging for posterity more than anything else, so you get what you get. There are rare days that I manage to write what I think is a masterpiece. There are the just keep on truckin’ days. And there are the days when I write like I’ve been eating psychedelic mushrooms or something. Actually, sometimes I like those days. Wonder what my great-grandchildren will think of me. [snort]

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