I'm a bit late to this party, but I just discovered Windows Live Writer which as it turns out is a fantastic tool for streamlining the process of blogging. Here's a company page with a good overview of features. I won't review it, there are already plenty of great reviews of it out there as well as plugins. I'll leave the details to the other articles that go into depth about this great new tool.
I will say that my first post with it was about as easy as it could be. I had written the entire thing in Microsoft Word 2003, mostly because it had some embedded images that were being difficult as usual within the drupal content editor, and I simply cut & pasted it into Live Writer and hit publish. It just worked, embedded images and all. I was amazed and had to post my kudos to the team who did this. Great job, folks!