When I write, I'll start out with some basic sense of direction. As soon as I get to a point where I'm not sure how to proceed, and I know this is experimental - or else I see something I want to fix, but I'm not entirely sure the new version keeps everything that did work - I highlight it all, copy, create a bunch of lines above it, and paste. Then I continue.

Sometimes I never do this. Things I post on Facebook often are not thought out much and I just put up what I wrote (and then second guess it all, and probably alter a bunch of little things, and quite likely delete the post).

Other times I do this over and over and over and over. There are poems I've written with hundreds of copies like this stacked up in a file, with random numbers of blank lines between them.

So far I have left no extra copies of this thing, though I've altered the paragraphing above.

There is a point. I'm not just pseudo-bragging about method, and it isn't just about bragplaining, either. This method I described is actually in some ways very frustrating. I started it - I'm not sure when - but it's now basically an unbreakable habit, no matter how imperfect I find it. For example, I dislike that I use a random number of lines between versions. Shouldn't I use a specific symbol to mark the transitions, and a fixed number of blank lines? I've tried. Many different variations of that. Nothing sticks. It's all too much effort. When I do this, I'm being completely impulsive. That's how I write - impulsively. Then I worry a million different ways. And I'm proud of some of it, and then embarrassed that I'm proud of something that isn't after all very good or appealing. That's kind of humiliating, to realize your best is dreck. But you have to. Or you can. I choose to.

The point is for years I've been trying to figure out a better method, and specifically a piece of software that would support it. Yes, I could use Track Changes in some app. Other apps have Snapshots. There are version control systems used by programmers but also appreciated by some writers and other content creators.

I wish any of that felt right to me.

I want to be able to survey the history without friction, all the versions. And I can. But I also want to be able to clear away that clutter instantly or navigate versions in a less linear, more functional sense. That is, when I edit a poem, and I'm copy-paste-editing new versions vertically in a stack, at any given time, I'm working on a particular part of the poem. Something bothers me, or some idea is tugging at me from out there and I'm trying to bring it down to earth and human letters. So a string of versions will be about that part. But then later - who knows where in the file, or when - I may be working on that same part again. There are poems I've edited here and there for 2 decades, some even a little bit more (though not as much, as my first poems didn't use this copy-paste-edit approach in a vertical stack - for those I usually have one or at most two versions). If I want to work on another version years later informed by all the previous versions, it becomes very difficult to survey the different options I've considered for any given part of the poem. Sometimes I'll put a chain of 4, 5, 10, 20 different words or phrases that are options for that part of the poem, all in the same version in the stack. Then the next version, I'll have a bunch more. Or a bunch of options for the next line, or the previous one.

At this point I don't write poems like that anymore, or not most of the time. I've gotten lazy, and more experienced, and much of what I consider I'm happy to leave unwritten, and just pick what I prefer right now, and leave it to time or whatever to see if I want to change it again.

But that belies the fact I do not have any one particular method, and each poem - each thing of any kind I write - can use a slightly different or a very different approach. I do still write strings of alternative words, sometimes. And years ago, I'd often use fancy parentheses and brackets and something like regexes to indicate different options and branches and whatever. That is, if I use this word, I should use this whole phrase, or maybe this whole phrase plus this other word, but if I use that word, then - you get the idea. You can sort of indicate that kind of thing with backslashes, parentheses, asterisks, brackets, perhaps symbols for AND (I generally didn't go that far), etc.

The reason I did that is because editing language is fundamentally not linear. Options are connected to other options in sporadic, unpredictable, long-distance, unobvious, intuitive ways. So I was grappling with that as I considered different options.

My point is I'd like a text editor that works with how minds actually work, or, anyway, more like how I work when I write. And I think the friction is that our minds do not work particularly well in terms of flat files, trees, snaphots, and linear histories. We're very webbed internally.

I keep trying to design that text editor, at least in my mind. A few times I've tried to write out my requirements.

I want to be able to navigate the alternatives for any piece of writing that has an edit history, and in a way that makes a lot of sense, and unfurls as you poke around - but that also makes available the sequence of complete versions (snapshots) in their original order. And I don't want to feel that my writing is trapped in the particular app that does this, and liable all to be destroyed by some bug in it.

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A group has recently been experimenting with poems that kind of play themselves. You watch the poem type itself out the way the poet originally worked through it all. This is pretty amazing to watch, and at first I thought they'd gone and done what I wanted. But it still isn't, quite. Their system gives you a scrub bar to pace through the movie of the poem as it's written. But that isn't yet a context-aware, branching navigation system as I imagine.

There are two impetuses. One is to improve the editing experience, and maybe improve the final works that way. The other is to present another kind of poem, in which composition or reading sequence becomes part of the expression. I like the idea that a poem could be (quite literally) different words to different people.

What this suggests is that a better tool for editing would also be a tool for presenting interactive poems. That is, you *could* reveal your editing history as a navigable, branchy webwork. *Or* you could use those same tools to compose a webwork that is all intended fully as the poem. In that scenario, every alternative would get equal weight, and readers could choose their way through according to their personal affinities. One easy option could even be to ask them, through their navigation choices, to write out a complete, set version of the poem. In that sense, the reader would become the editor at the same time, and the final version would be their miniature publication, shared, of course, and primarily, with the original author. That's a way to relate to someone that most of the time most of use do not use or even really have access to, though technically now we do.