I just finished the first draft of a book I’ve been working on for exactly one year.

With any lengthy project of mine, there is a sense of melancholy when I put the first draft away. After so long with the words in sharp focus, so long swimming in the structure, themes, emotions, etc., it takes an indeterminate amount of time out of mind to come back for another edit — usually months. My last book, for example, I finished the latest draft of in 2003, but it continues to sit patiently while I finish other projects. It will be the better for it in the long run, but walking away from that first draft is like sending your kid off to school on their first day: Bittersweet.

This latest book is quite short, but condensed in its relatively few words are a lifetime’s worth of emotional, personal experiences. It may never be published, but it wasn’t written for that purpose.

I continue work on a new novel, which I actually began 10 years ago but put aside 60,000 words into it when I realized I wasn’t ready to write that particular book. That was a hard decision at the time, as I was still riding on steam left over from my first novel, finished the year before. I’ve revisited the book occasionally, making voluminous notes over the intervening years, while I worked on other things, learning as much as I could. The process culminated this year with a realization that I was at last ready to begin.

You wish you could celebrate, and you can for a day or so. And then? A dark drawer, out of sight, perhaps a new pen, and onto the next spiral notebook.

(From August 2004; nowadays, Tiger has a built-in dictionary/thesaurus, finally catching it up to NeXT in at least one department ;)

One of the joys of writing on a computer is, of course, not having to take a typewriter with you or type things later from your longhand notebook. You can also bring gigabytes of music, text, just about anything. If you can get online, you have virtually any information you might need, instantly — or at least as fast as your Google-fu can manage.

Early in my writing life, back in the days when a “portable” computer meant lugging a Mac SE around, the one thing I would always have in my backpack, without fail, was a paperback dictionary and often a thesaurus as well. Assuming I’m online nowadays, a dictionary is available instantly by a variety of methods.

Of course, spell checking is available immediately in pretty much any application on OS X, but what if you can’t think of the word? And what if you can’t get online at all? Horrific thought, yes, but such are the vagaries of the early 21st century. Internet-based dictionary programs like OmniDictionary fail immediately. Now I could hack together a local dict server on my computer, but I don’t really feel like doing that. What is a writer to do?

Enter Nisus Thesaurus. Over 120,000 words in a handy interface, with both definitions and related words so you get the best of both a dictionary and a thesaurus. It also functions as a Service, so you can access its info in other applications. And it doesn’t need to be online to function.

The best feature of all? It’s a free download.