i wrote my story in plain text in vim. when i was forced to convert to libre office in order to produce the format required for submission, editing became a pain, and i felt blocked from working on the story any further, since i no longer was able to just take any break i had to work on it.
not being able to use my preferred editor, i too ended up searching for a better solution...
What a pain! And there don't seem to be any good + easy answers...
I'm addicted to my emacs bindings, and not using them trips me up—I might as well draft in plaintext, like you said preferred editor minimizes friction.
But then there's the cost of switching tools at different stages of the writing process. Arguably, that's even more difficult!
the editing itself wasn't even the problem, but i realized that i want to track changes as the story evolves, and while i know that libreoffice can do that, there is just no comparison to text based version control systems.
if i had accepted that i would be comfortable enough with libreoffice, that would have been fine, but having to face switching back and forth, and continuously reformatting, made me dread the whole process.
so yes, switching is really the most difficult aspect.
fortunately, as discussed elsewhere here, there is a way to automatically convert from plain text to the format required for submission, so i should be able to continue writing without this roadblock now
This is the crux of the challenge for every writer. At least for me, I use "finding the right tool" as a way to procrastinate from actually writing...