Honestly, just living. Spending a lot of time offline these days. Kinda nice

Eventually you gotta hone into that idea where you write for yourself and you never have to justify or reason to anyone why you do this. Your pursuit towards this goal can be severed from the hustle, and it frees you from needing to make every moment of life 'productive'.

Yeah, I do that. LibreOffice if you want something similar to MS Word, but personally I prefer Scrivener and have used it for years. One-time purchase, fantastic for everything.

but it really depends what grammar you're following. CMOS is the American publishing standard. UK grammar dictates there's only a capitalisation after a full stop, so same thing.

According to the CMOS 12.43 on faltering speech and incomplete thoughts, looks like you don't capitalise afterwards when it's in dialogue like that.

My parents put me in my first writing class when I was about 10. It set it all off, but still Ieft writing many times after that. These days, I write because I must, and that's all there is to it.