I was hit by one of those obvious but interesting thoughts the other day, and since I don't post very often, and since it's actually similar to John Levitt's guest blog over at the League of Reluctant Adults, I was inspired to share.
In my day job, I'm a computer programmer.  When I start a project that's more than a decent size, I might start off with a design document, where I figure out the flow of the program(s), and the best form to tackle them with.  And quite often I'll go back to this and make changes as I'm actually writing the code.  I might give the design to some of my teammates to check it out and see where I missed the mark.  I write a version of the code and see if I can get it to work for me.  Then I'll get those teammates to look over this.  Some of them like to pick apart my syntax, others might be good at catching the overall errors, or pointing out simpler ways to do things, or how to make it more efficient.  After taking their comments into account, I send it off to the test team for functional testing, and user testing.  So I sit and wait while they're looking it over.  Then I get back comments about how great it is, or, more often, some tweaks and little changes.  We might go back and forth a few times like that, then it's ready for production.  Before it actually gets there, I have some additional stuff to do to make sure the people that will be using it know that it's coming and so forth, and then it's out for the users.
Any of that process sound familiar to you writers? :)  Of course, with the day job I usually start off with requirements, and they're more detailed than "write something I'll like".

OK, I also think it funny that I just hit spell check and it's giving me options to correct "blog".