I just stumbled across a discussion on "The writing process" on Roger Johansson's blog. I love discussions about writing, particularly when I don't want to write, and Roger's blog is always interesting. A lot of people responded with thoughtful details about their own writing processes. For other writers, this is fascinating reading. Of course, I started thinking about my own writing process, and I came up with some surprising conclusions.

I'm in New York for, of all things, an auction at Sotheby's (it's a long story involving my husband and a Babe Ruth contract, but I'm sure you, too, have had it up to the eyeballs with sports, so I'll just breeze by all that). For the out-of-towner, NYC is like a jolt from a giant defibrillator. Everything perks up and picks up the pace. You find yourself moving more quickly and even talking faster. They should re-nickname it The Big Java.

I am a designer with a past. A dark, secret, shadowy past of nested tables, inline font tags and spacer gifs. My past is littered with shamefully bloated sites built with disgracefully contorted HTML. I'd like to forget about that past. But what they say is true. The past does come back to haunt you.

Yesterday was a lousy day. I fired up the computer, all prepared to get to work on the site I've been building for over a month. I took one look at the homepage flickering on the screen, and suddenly I recoiled in horror.

Just got this week's Web Design Update in my morning's inbox, and once again had to stop everything, make a cup of tea and read it through. Laura Carlson, who puts out the newsletter, does a marvelous job week after week. For my money Web Design Update is the best webdev newsletter out there. So here'