Great Writing Software

Part of the challenge of writing, weather it be for blogs, books, or journaling, is to find a piece of software that allows you to express yourself, and organize yourself.

I like to write with an old pair of Sony headphones cranking out my current WinAmp playlist or a great Pandora channel.  this keeps the outside, outside.  but how do you keep the outside in your computer, outside?

I have found my writing platform of choice to be a software called Scrivner.  It keeps me focused, organizes my new ideas, tracks submissions, etc..  at least the way I have it set up.  This is my platform, not necessarily anyone else s.  I have thought it would be nice to use Evernote just to have the remote access a phone brings, but who really writes with their thumbs?  I do use Evernote for simple tracking, but, for my workflow, Scrivner is the best I have found.

In Scrivner, I have categories; Draft, Submitted, and Ideas.  this provides gross categorization.  Drafts is where I do most of my work, writing posts and preparing them for submission.  Submitted has sub categories for year (2012,2013,2014) and under each year it has the months of the year.  As I submit my posts, I rename them to include a "Submitted - Date - Title" and drag them to the appropriate month.  this allows me to track what is done, what has been done, and what I have written.  The Ideas category is for random musings, that may or may not get moved into draft for the workflow.

Core to all of this is that I can "Turn Off" and not be online.  This prevents distraction as I an information junkie.  Email, Blogs, News, etc...  this is all what is standing in my way.  I use a non connected state as well as headphones to zone out and just write.  I may need to reconnect occasionally as research needs to be done, but I have a day or two each week for that, and notes can go into the Ideas tab.

What works for you?  I am open to suggestions.