OmmWriter

Okay, this would drive me com-puh-LETE-ly mental, but if you're looking for a word-processing experience that's more spa-like than Word...

http://www.ommwriter.com/

Now, on the plus side, you can strip the interface down to a beautiful, minimalist no-distractions user-experience that is among the best I've seen.  The strength is that you can dial this thing from Bauhaus squeaky-clean antiseptic all the way to "Jimi Hendrix" freakout.  If you crave stimulus while you get your wordsmith on, but find all the distractions distracting, this at least keeps all your distractions in one place, as it were.

Writing is an incredibly personal, intimate, finicky process.  I would rather remove my own organs with a blunt stick than write an entire manuscript in Word.  Personally, I use the get-outta-my-face Text editor that comes with a Mac for all my writing (yes, all my books were written in Text), unless it's a screenplay in which I case I use Final Draft and only-ever Final Draft.

I don't want style palettes and 30 format buttons across the top and pale, colour-coded icons parading around the outside of my anything.  And I sure as hell don't want an American programmer correcting my grammar with a squiggly line simply because one of my characters said "ain't" in a line of dialogue.  For me I want to get as close to a blank sheet of paper and a magic typewriter with copy-paste-undo as possible.  The full screen mode in OS X Lion is great for that.  A white expanse of limitless possibility, and each black letter a footprint in the snow.  And nothing else.  Just the writer and the naked, exposed word.  A black null in a sea of liquid crystal.  Nothing else going on.

Multi-tasking was a lie, but that's another blog post.

But to organize my thoughts, I have a $40 Cross steel-nibbed fountain pen and a small, hardcover Moleskine notebook (I'm addicted to these).  I just can't read my handwriting after, but the process is valuable for me.  Muscle memory, the way your writing has to slow down with a fountain pen, how you have to wait a moment before you turn the page as the ink dries.  Sip coffee, think about it.  So my own writing quirks run from the brutishly minimal to the exquisitely complicated, and often in the same hour.

Writers are weird.  Creatives are weird.  But the sooner you grok exactly the way in which you're weird, the sooner you can work with that and get down to it.