Focus! I said FOCUS!!

Perhaps a writer's best friend is living in a distraction free environment. I used to live in that world - sort of - when I was about 12-18 years old. Once the Internet became fast and more efficient than AOL ("You've got mail!") and Netscape (which would take 5 minutes to load one page) my writing career took a sharp nose dive. Why slave over writing or cry yourself to sleep from lack of inspiration when you can waste hours surfing the Net while creating the illusion you did something productive with your life?

Well now I can say I'm back to the slaving and the crying again because I found a program that helps me write like back in the old days when my computer wasn't jacked into the World Wide Web.

I have found perhaps the most boring word processing program in the world.

Focus Writer.

It blanks out the screen leaving just you, your blinking cursor and anything you write on the page. Tools, menus and scroll bars vanish unless you move your mouse cursor near them. You can't see any windows that are minimized when you're in the program. You have to either exit FocusWriter or minimize it in order to see any other minimized windows or programs.

FocusWriter is free if you want to try it out. You can customize it to any color font or screen you want. You can even use an image as your background although I find this pretty distracting. One cool little feature I've found oddly conducive to boosting my word count are the typewriter sounds feature. I love the clicking sounds as I write although when I start a new paragraph the sound of the "typerwriter" sliding back still scares the shit out of me. There are a lot of other nice features such as a timer (if you want to write a set amount of time) or a word count goal for the day.

Places you can download FocusWriter for free:

Gott Code

Snap Files

Softonic

CNet

FocusWriter with an image background