Forbidden Word: An Author Speaks Out!

Our friend, Ben Britten Smith, AKA Panda, wrote to us from Australia to express his preference for certain writing tools. We applaud his passion, but wonder if he could improve his use of understatement:

“Can we please never ever ever use MS Word ever again? It is a terrible program and it makes me angry just opening it up and seeing its horrendously bad UI. I understand that there may be some ebook publishing plugins or something that requires Word, but at least for any projects that I am involved in, I would ask that everyone be using something less gross, like Pages (or just a Google Doc if these people don’t have Macs, (or even a LaTex document and SVN) whatever), and then at the very end, when everything is totally done and dusted, then someone, in a dark room, far away from prying eyes, can crack open the necromantic horror that is MS Word and put it all in at that point. This way all the rest of the team members will be spared the eldritch insanity that comes with using such an abomination of user experience.” -Ben Smith

Ben is not alone. In fact, this may be the most-often and widely expressed concern we’ve received at the Collegium WalrusInkium. We have no intention of shackling WalrusInk authors to inefficient, ugly, or otherwise counterproductive software. Writing is hard enough without imposing tools of such “necromantic horror” and “eldritch insanity” that anger, frustration, and depression are assured. We say to Ben and others who feel as he does, “Fear not!”
-Professor Walrus