The closest we come to worrying about daily goals is ticking off the points we wanted to cover, either mentally or perhaps on a sticky note where we scrawled them.įocusWriter does have one feature that might be useful: A timer with an alarm. I - and every other selling writer that I know - is more concerned with finished pieces. Daily goals are a concern of wannabes, who want to knock off and agonize over their strivings in their blogs as soon as possible. The same is true of the percentage of daily goal. I almost never have a request for page count, and editors themselves seem uninterested in accuracy nearer than to within half a page, because the number of ads and the amount of copy deleted or added makes up any difference.Īs for the number of characters, which FocusWriter also gives, forget it. All I know is that no editor has complained about my word counts, and what I get is more than good enough for me. Personally, I have not the least idea how Bluefish calculates words - whether, for instance, it counts HTML tags or spaces or counts words as five or six spaces.
Under such approximations, exactly how words are counted, which FocusWriter allows you to set in its preferences, is largely irrelevant. Only amateurs care enough to get the exact count. However, the key word here is "approximate." In selling over 950 articles, I have yet to meet an editor who wants more than a count rounded off to the nearest multiple of 50 or 100. Assignments are usually given out in approximate word-lengths, which helps editors plan layout. If you are writing for publication, an approximate word count is useful. Take, for example, the progress indicators. The problem is that FocusWriter also provides other features that Gott imagines that Writers need that are actually other forms of distractions. And, whether full-screened or windowed, with its auto-hide menu and icon and status bars, FocusWriter does provide a minimalist environment in which to work. Graeme Gott, FocusWriter's developer describes it as a "fullscreen, distraction-free word processor," which sounds like something that should suit me. I am actually surprised and disappointed to make that statement. Unfortunately, while it shows some promise, it turns out to be another writing tool designed more for wannabes than a working writer. But I am always on the lookout for other tools, which is why FocusWriter interested me.
It has just about everything I need - a word count, a spell-checker, and shortcuts to produce clean HTML (if that's what the editor requires), and little of the overhead and distractions of a word processor.