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I've been a big fan of Obsidian for years. Once I started teaching myself how to write long-form fiction, I tried at least six different tools. When you're doing zero-to-one work, "magic" tools will fuck you up every time. The beauty of Obsidian is that there isn't any magic. Write markdown, stick it in a folder and do nothing. Or you can write markdown, organize a nest of folders and tags and do a lot. I didn't know how to write long-form fiction, and I determined that the last freaking thing in the world I wanted was a tool that imposed a process or recipe. God, recipe-driven fiction is a POS. So I started with nothing and added and removed structure as necessary to teach myself. I even set up a second folder to add all of my research and how-to trials and errors as I went along. Way cool. Just finished my first novel at ~700 pages. My currect system is still more complex than I need, but I'm learning. Along the way I wrote a build pipeline where I just write in Obsidian, run a script, and end up with pdfs, ebooks, interactive website, etc. I've even got it almost all the way through the desktop publishing part that comes at the end. Probably need another year for that. If those folks start adding any kind of lock-in (I know they won't) or beginning over-engineering the UI, I'm out. And guess what? I can take my markdown elsewhere. And my pipeline still works! It's a beautiful thing. I use far, far too much Obsidian, building cataloging systems in the sky. Tools tend to engage your imagination of what you might need to do instead of what you actually need. But with Obsidian, I don't need to go down the garden path. I can pull that crap back out. I couldn't have learned writing with any other tool. Obsidian allowed me to make structural and Information Architecture mistakes and iterate without locking me in somewhere. Love the tool, guys! Keep doing nothing! |