I always write on my laptop, in MS Word. Always have.
Where I write - in bad weather or winter it's my dining room table or my sewing room table. In winter always the dining room, as that's where the wood stove is, and I live in front of it in winter.
In warmer, good weather, I usually take my laptop outside. I live on a small lake, which I can see from my front porch, so often I write there. Sometimes I write on the back porch, gazebo, even in the garage with the doors open. Wherever I feel like going that day and where the nicest breeze is.
I suppose it's time to update this, since my setup has changed a bit.
I no longer write in Word. I hate it actually, and, for me, it became far too bossy and intrusive even when I shut "features" off. The Grammarly thing on it was giving me migraines. It
constantly told me I was in the wrong tense and flagged things that absolutely should not have been flagged. I understand that I write most things in first person present and their little AI machines have a real problem with that, and if I could have just shut it off that would be fine, but it never stayed off. No matter what I did. Honestly, it was making me hate writing. I went to ProWritingAid
very briefly. Yes, it has AI (which I was already running from) but I was assured I could shut it off there. It seemed to work, at first, but on more than one occasion it would just randomly "predict" what it thought I wanted to say and write a whole paragraph to "help" me. It was never even remotely correct in its predictions and rage is not a strong enough word. It also kept making suggestions that were incorrect. My laptop barely survived.
Then I dug into Scrivener and found joy. Is it perfect? No. The number of times I've had to instruct it to "learn" a perfectly normal English word (after first trying to spell it ways I was pretty sure were wrong and then checking my sanity on the web) has become something I choose to view as amusing. It does actually learn it though. Once I tell it to, it never flags that word again (across all projects. I have close to 300k words written on it between all projects since I started using it in June). It's entirely unobtrusive. It has very handy features, My character and setting line-ups are right there and I can add to them at anytime, and the best part - I don't have to write in double spaced hell anymore. I can write normal, and it has a compile feature that switches everything to standard manuscript format when you need it to. This feature works extremely well as long as you double check all settings and verify. All that to say, I write on Scrivener. Still on the same Lenovo Legion gaming laptop, which I also adore.
The places and times I do so are the same, though I now use a tiny, light, portable desk on wheels, just big enough for my laptop and my mouse. It's adjustable, so no matter where I take it, I can adjust the height and angle. The wrist pain and neck stiffness are gone. It's all so much better now. It isn't perfect, either, but for the 50 bucks it cost me, it's saved me a tremendous amount of pain.
Minor editing I do on the laptop, but major editing and read throughs, I email the exported manuscript file to my kindle color which allows me to highlight and make notes while reading anywhere as I would any book (You wouldn't think color would matter, but it makes it so much easier to see what I've done). When I'm done, I go through the notes with my laptop in front of me and make all changes. It's all combined to increase my productivity dramatically.
Edit: This wasn't intended as judgement on anyone who uses Word, Grammarly, PWA, etc. It's just very much not for me.
