About six months ago I blogged about my Christmas gift to myself: a Svalboard keyboard. It’s a very non-standard design, very science-fictional looking. I wrote about my evolution of ergonomic design for typing in this post about my keyboards and meant to check back in.
What is the experience been now that it’s a daily part of my life?
In short, it’s great. It does the trick, reducing pain and irritation on my hands as I type. Adding the roller balls into the mix has also been interesting, my mousing hand has been healing as well.
How hard was it to adapt to? It’s hard to say, I spent a few weeks working hard at taking lessons on the custom typing app, moving slowly up the speed chart. I would say I could type on it at around 40 words a minute after a few weeks, but I was in the middle of a semester, and I did not move this to my office as a daily driver but kept it at home to use occasionally. By the end of the semester it still felt a little alien, and I had to think when I used it.
Cut to the start of summer, and my home office becomes my daily driver, and I started using the keyboard regularly. As of now, my last test showed 72 words per minute with a 97 percent accuracy rate. I hit a run of keys that tripped me up on a word, if not for that one word I would have hit more of a 98 to 99 percent rate, which is where I sit on a regular keyboard.
I would have adapted faster, were it not for the fact that I have been tinkering with and optimizing my Glyph editing system, which I’ve made tweaks to to consider the Svalboard’s layout more, as I had mostly been using it to edit on my laptop. The Sval’s roller balls mean I have to choose what key I use for a mouse click and right mouse click. I started by using the inner thumb keys, which are also the space keys, which trigger the Glyph movement and editing systems when held down for me now. That works great on all my keyboard setups except for the Sval, which then causes hiccups when I am trying to click and it thinks I really mean spacebar. When the ball is in motion, the key functions change, so what is normally spacebar becomes click as the ball is rolling, and for a split second after it stops. Miss the window, and you’re not clicking the mouse, but hitting space.
Well, that is something some people can internalize, I kept not doing it, so I remapped the keys a bit, and now click is the thumb up key that hooks over the thumb. Less immidiate than the space thumb key, but it doesn’t share any other key functions, all it does is click, and that is working well. But I have experimented with so many remappings of keys that I keep having to rebuild my brain connections and muscle memory, as you can imagine, this much remapping is also a heavy demand on the learning circuits…
…but the more I play, the more my brain goes ‘oh, this BS again, he’s playing around, I suppose we’ll have to adapt.’
I know this seems like a bit much, but seeing how many authors I talk to who experience carpal tunnel pain and reduced ability, whereas I seem to be healing up, and no longer having high pain days the way I used to, I still find this alternate ergonomic keyboard to be one of the greatest health investments short of a gym membership I’ve made in a long time.
Long live the Svalboard, eradicator of repetitive stress injury pain.
As an author, if I were ever to do an infomercial, it would be for this piece of kit. I cannot recommend it enough.
One of the things I mentioned when talking about using Obsidian to write my novels was that I prefer looking at my writing in a book format: I like indents, and I prefer no spaces between my paragraphs unless there’s a section break. In fact, I hate that the core internet design, flush paragraphs, spaces between them, that HTML settled on by engineers.
In a rare moment of feeling ‘old’ and shaking my fist at the clouds, I wish more of internet laid out text more like print. But that’s another cause I’ll be taking up on this site soon for display of my fiction. For now, I wanted to create a CSS snippet that I could drop into Obsidian using its CSS snippets function to change how my fiction is displayed as a I write and edit in Obsidian.
I slapped some CSS in there to create indents, but Markdown asks for an extra space between each paragraph and looks something like this post, or, here is a simple MD viewer/editor with some MD showing:
I can read Markdown and write in raw Markdown just fine, but when lost in fiction flow I prefer it to look like the printed page. So I deleted all the extra lines in my Markdown files and added indents, and got on with using Obsidian. Which was fine until… I needed to export my Markdown.
Now, that extra space is missing for MD to other file translators, so I was having to do a lot of copying and pasting and fixing the formatting to send documents to others. That was less than ideal. I did finally hack together a little script that could do it for me, but it broke, and I realized that by shifting Markdown format, when I used another Markdown reader that wasn’t Obsidian, the text looked wonky.
So I spent a day working on this, and here is the CSS if you want it for your own:
It looks like a book. I need to adjust the font, but I like the look. And I can edit, type, live in that just happily as I write fiction. And then, when I click back to source mode, I get raw Markdown:
The metadata YAML for the story is in the header, hidden when I am in non-source mode view, but easy to open when needed. When I work in notes, I can remain in source view, but for fiction, I have my more book-looking vibe.
So now my Markdown to other document format exporters work exactly as expected.
I just need to go write a script to add the lines back in to my over two thousand notes, novels, and story files in my external brain without destroying any hard work.
I never gave much thought to my keyboard in my early 20s. It just came with the computer I purchased. If one died, I would go out and buy a $20 keyboard at the store, more often than not, I just had a couple lying around. I gave no thought to how it was made, if it was comfortable, or whether I aesthetically liked it.
I started thinking about keyboards when I started writing novels. And somewhere in my late 20s, my wrists and hands started to hurt, so I began to wonder how to soften the impact of typing. I read about making sure I didn’t have arm rests digging into my forearms or elbows. The proper ergonomics for typing led to me making sure I had a keyboard tray to lower the keyboard so my arms were parallel to the floor, a decent chair, and a chair with low or no arms.
Still, wrist pain plagued me. So I purchased my first ergonomic keyboard, the Microsoft Natural Elite:
The Elite did something that surprised and confused me at first, it split the two halves of the keyboard apart. That took a couple weeks to adjust to, but the benefit of that is that it stops you from twisting your wrists:
In addition, people often ‘tent’ or raise the back of their keyboard up because it has stands there, but that’s horrible for your hands, while the Elite had stands on the front of the board by their wrist, which slopes the board away from you, which allows your fingers to ‘float’ over the keyboard in a more natural angle, with your hand hanging limp, rather than jammed upwards:
The Natural Elite, combined with a good desk chair with low arms, and a keyboard tray, helped my wrist pain a great deal. In addition, the Elite also a sort of shape to it where the TGB and YHN keys were higher than the QAZ and side keys, it rose up in the middle. That meant my hands weren’t flat, they were at a slightly more comfortable angle.
Here’s a test. Hold your wrists out in front of you in the flat, palm down position. Now rotate your hand to a 45 degree angle, now to a handshake, now slowly rotate back to palms down. What feels natural?
Look at what happens to your arm when you rotate it to face palm down:
Your arm bones literally cross over each other to create this position. Holding it for hours on end while tying induces stress, it traps nerves and blood regulation, it just isn’t good for you. By reducing how flat the keyboard is, you reduce the amount of ‘pronation’ in your arms. The Elite has a slight raise, so it offered relief.
The Elite also had very nice ‘clacky’ keys for me, so I remember that after two Elite boards, Microsoft helpfully killed it.
Thankfully they replaced it with the Microsoft Sculpt board:
It didn’t have nice clicky mechanical keys, but small chicklet keys, and for the first time, I realized I didn’t like those kinds of keys, but it was an ergonomic board.
Over time, however, the wrist pain returned, and even the MS Sculpt couldn’t keep it at bay. What to do?
I began to research other ergonomic boards. Expensive boards.
In the 1970s, in the UK, a professional typist named Lily Maltron began to take notes and do some amateur research on optimal keyboard design. She hit upon a few concepts that would, 50 years later, become adopted by online keyboard enthusiasts and cause an almost Cambrian explosion of keyboard design that we’ve seen in the last decade, but was almost the only game in town for rigorous thinking about reducing the impact of ulnar pronation and RSI impact.
Maltron’s idea was to look at ways to separate the two halves of the keyboard to allow a better angle for the arms, and to create a bowl shaped area for the keys to allow your fingers to naturally ‘dip in’ to the key well. This meant placing the keys all the same distance apart, rather than the extra movement you have to do on a flat plane. She also realized that a flat plane makes no sense because your fingers don’t end on a flat plane:
As a result, she created a bowl for the fingers, but staggered the rows, creating a modified ‘ortholinear’ style where each row of the letters is at a different depth for our different fingers. Here it is:
You can see that the keys are in up and down rows, making your fingers reach up, or down, or to the side in some cases, but not diagonally like a modern slab keyboard:
Modern keyboards are staggered because old typewriters needed the keys to be set apart so the mechanical rods that linked your key to the strike didn’t hit each other, you can see the logic of this on this old Olympia:
But there is no reason for keys to remain staggered like this in a modern keyboard, in fact, it creates a lot of issues with accuracy in modern touch typing because on a QWERTY layout, the Y key is further from the home J key than the T key is from the F key. It also makes some of the bottom row hard to feel out on a modern, staggered board.
I couldn’t afford a Maltron at the time, but I found a US company that had basically found, or imitated the same design concepts. Kinesis created a line of Maltron-like keyboards for American typists at a more affordable price point, and I was soon the owner of a Kinesis Advantage keyboard:
By the time I ordered the Kinesis, I was desperate. Typing novels meant pain. I was having to ice my hands in buckets of ice water every night and I was taking anti-inflammatories every night. Within a month, I had relief. The bowl shape was hard to get used to, but within a week or two I felt comfortable on it, and since I had already split the two halves of my keyboard with an Elite, it wasn’t too hard.
I found spreading my hands out, the bowl dipping my fingers in, and the other cool thing, the thumb clusters, really helped. In fact, putting functions on my thumbs was a huge step, because thumbs are pretty strong, and just using them for spacebar is a bit of a waste.
The $400 for a Kinesis was way less than the cost of carpal tunnel surgery that my doctor was starting to suggest I may need to look into, so it became clear it was worth the price in short order.
And then… I went down a rabbit hole.
Because, with my fingers feeling better, I started to realize that the mechanical keys on the Kinesis reminded me of how much I loved the ‘clacky’ keys on my old MS Elite, lost when I got a Sculpt, but now regained. The Kinesis came with something called “Cherry Brown” mechanical keys, and so out of curiosity, I started reading about different ‘key switches’ and ordered some samples to see what I liked. It turns out “Cherry Blue” keys that sound loud and clicky delighted me, but they didn’t come in Kinesis, even though I emailed and asked.
But reading about keys led me to the mechanical keyboard community, which eight years ago had just gotten its hands on 3d printers. Keyboard nerds were designing and making new boards with keys they liked. Some to recapture old, retro boards they liked. Some to do new things. And some to push the ergonomic designs to see if they could do better than Maltron or Kinesis.
3d printing really shifted the whole game. Whole new generations of experimentation, with the ability to print new case designs to test them, allowed a form factor to evolve that contained the orthogonal layout with depth variation so that fingers fit nicely into them, they have tenting, so that the inner column are raised up to reduce pronation, and they’re fully split so you can space them apart, and the thumb clusters sit in a natural sweep area. This is the Dactyl Manuform:
Seven or so years ago, I didn’t have the capability to hand make one of my own. It required hand-soldering the keys to a chip, so I ended up paying to have one made for me by a 3d printing enthusiast, and then eventually got a second one so I could have one at home and one at work.
Back then I had to have one custom made for me, now, people have noticed the success of the form, and now you have manufactured keyboards like the Glove80, clearly inspired by the Dactyl Manuform:
Kinesis has a fully split keyboard now, so between the Glove80 and the Kinesis Advantage, there are some good split, bowl-shaped keyboards out there now that you can buy.
A few months ago, my Dactyl’s started to get finicky, and I realized they were hand-made, and near the end of their lives. In addition, over seven years, the technology had gotten better. Instead of having to use a paperclip to bridge pins on a chip to force the keyboard to reboot and mount up so you can reprogram the keyboard (choose what the thumb keys are, or if you want a different layout, or if you want to use layers). I ordered a new Dactyl from a custom maker, unaware of the Glove80’s existence, that uses a system called Vial to program the board. It’s super easy to reprogram the board, which is neat.
But I had two keyboards dying, and while digging around, I found another development in the keyboard world.
Back in the late 90s, I learned about a keyboard called the “Datahand” keyboard. You’ve likely seen it as a prop in an SF show:
The idea behind it is that each little cluster has the ability to press down, press down southward, flick up northward, or move east or west.
Created by an ergonomic research company that went public, the keys were so light to tap, and required so little effort RSI sufferers praised it so highly it caught my eye. It saved careers. But the company went out of business in the early 00s.
But that 3d printing revolution I mentioned? Tinkerers started playing with recreating the Datahand so that they could repair it, or get its functionality back because when users who depended on the Datahand lost it they were also facing the dilemma of maybe losing their careers. So out of that came something called the “Lalboard” which allowed you to measure your hand and try to print a version of the Datahand.
From that, another tinkerer who had a Datahand die on them, looked to the Lalboard and began to iterate on the design to make it fully adjustable to any hand type or shape. That became the Svalboard:
The Svalboard uses magnets in the paddles to snap back into place. They only need 20grams of force to actuate, over the 70-90 grams of regular keyboard keys. The fact that all the paddles are just within a millimeter or so of your fingers, each item can be untightened and moved to fully adjust any part of the keyboard. The palm rest is actually only supporting your palm, not digging into your wrist and causing complications with blood flow or compressed tendons.
It’s pricey not making it yourself, but all the parts can be printed, I have copies of the STL files, and the mechanical parts are off the shelf.
I ordered one of these as my home setup, using savings. Pricey, yes, but two months ago I was starting to get, again, some pain… only in my mousing wrist. I set out to solve this by moving my editing to keyboard only, using the Glyph editing system I mocked up to use keys instead of a mouse. However, I was still having to use the mouse a ton, and when I saw that my dream keyboard since the late 90s was now once again available I noticed that the new inventor had added trackballs right into the design. I wouldn’t ever have to lift my hands off my ‘keyboard’ to mouse about.
This has radically reduced my wrist strain on my mousing hands. And the benefits after six weeks of use are that my hand is healing up really nicely.
So right now, the Kinesis, the Glove80, or the Svalboard seem to be amazing choices for ergonomic keyboards. And as expensive as the Svalboard is, it’s a *fraction* of the cost of my health insurance deductible for the Svalboard.
Six weeks ago, when I got a Svalboard delivered, I started out being able to type a mere 20-30 words per minute. As of today I’m typing in the mid to high 60 words per minute. I type at about 80-90 words per minute on my Dactyl Manuform at work. I’m imagining that in a few weeks I’ll match that speed.
I’ll shortly post more about the Svalboard, learning to use it, what it feels like, but my recommendation is: if you have wrist pain, arm pain, finger pain, carpal tunnel pain, this is way, way cheaper than surgery (which isn’t always guaranteed to solve the carpal inflammation) and it is harder to adjust to than it was to adjust to my first split keyboard, but once adjusted, this is clearly a huge level up.
So here’s a project that I’ve been working on for the last 10 years that I’m going to just put out there for others to see what they think, or maybe use.
I find editing large amounts of text in a modern OS to be painful to my wrists. Using a mouse to select text, move it around, then switching back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard adds to the strain. I’ve been very invested in ergonomic keyboards and even alternate keyboard layouts to help my wrists. But no matter what you do with the keyboard, editing is still often a painful process due to the mouse.
This isn’t a new problem. Before operating systems got graphical user interfaces the keyboard was the only input source, so this problem was attacked by programmers and early writing programs. Early programmers used text-only systems for editing their code. vim, emacs, and spacemacs are common tools (spacemacs is an update to emacs, but some consider its own thing) used still to this day, as programmers editing large amounts of code find keeping their hands on the keyboard is efficient.
Early text editing programs also had that issue as well. With no mouse, how did writers in the early 80s or 70s using their early programs go back and edit their stories or novels or even business reports?
They used the keyboard.
In programs like Wordstar, writers used key combinations to navigate the cursor around the screen, select text, and edit it. Many writers still use this 50-year old program, rigging up DOS environments, or paying programmers to keep it up and running because the keyboard shortcuts are deep habits, and they don’t have to pick their hands off the keyboard over to a mouse and back constantly.
I’ve heard writers in my field praise Wordstar and the ability to move around the text with keys only but when I was editing I began to wonder about helping my wrists out by learning a keyboard navigation system. I began some years ago by looking into emacs and vim, as I didn’t know of any systems for non-programmers. emacs I found tough to master as it required a lot of memorization up front to get into using it right off the bat. It uses a system that is almost grammar like. Powerful, but hard to get started with.
I spent some time looking into vim as well, and began using it while in Obsidian, a text editor that I use to write in that uses it. The power of moving the cursor around with keys was clear, but over and over I found it hard to memorize. I’m adhd, so the instructions that came with vim required me to keep a printout near my screen to look up commands. It felt unintuitive to me, particularly the use of hjkl keys just didn’t map to anything that made sense to me and my fingers, even after several years of trying, would still get tripped up. This doesn’t make sense to me:
But WASD keys for gaming, as that is a paradigm I have instinctively wired into my fingers:
Arrow keys, movement on a keyboard, are 3 keys on the bottom and one on top. It’s just the way it is in my head, and fighting it is counterproductive for me, even after trying years of remapping my brain to the vim style.
So what to do?
Some years ago I paid a programmer to help me code a system that used IJKL keys to move around when I tapped a key, but it was a bit overcomplicated to set up, but it started me down the idea of designing my own layout that worked in a way that didn’t fight my arrow key neuroprogramming. I’ve tested out several variations of it, but decided to spend my Fall Break actually turning it into something I’d use as I’d found myself looking up vim commands again that I’d forgotten during the semester as I hadn’t been editing.
What I wanted was something that I would start using without thinking about.
My first iteration of a mockup that I called ‘vigor’ some years ago:
The core idea was to be able to hit the capslock key and at the very least be able to move around with arrow keys (launch edit mode). But even this required a lot more memorization than I felt was needed.
The next iteration began a few weeks ago when I downloaded an app for my MacBook Air called Karabiner-Elements which allowed key remapping. It had an implementation of vim that worked system-wide, because the little bit of vim I was using only working in Obsidian. If I was going to take on the trouble of memorizing any system, I wanted it to work in as many different writing environments as possible.
Again, though, I found vim to not work in a way my brain liked. So using Karabiner, and using a set of keyboard maps called vim mode plus for guidance to see how to write the json code to remap the keys, I started creating a new setup. The idea was to hit a key (‘d’) using my left index finger to then be able to select text, not just move it around.
This was my first attempt at a keyboard that could fit where my fingers felt more comfortable using that as a guiding idea:
I’ve spent a week fiddling around with it and quickly realized that there was some user interface and user experience issue with it, as it required some memorization. I could use line up or down, and word left or right, and use capslock to pop in and out. But I found some of the logic missing until I rearranged things around:
So hitting capslock pops me into the editing mode, and then the IJKL keys move me around. Hold the ‘d’ key while in this mode, and they get selected.
That felt natural, I was moving text around and editing in minutes. Dropping from paragraph in the upper row, to word, to then character made intuitive sense, even when I forgot the map that knowledge remained. Moving the end of line keys to other side of the arrow keys also made more intuitive sense, and since operating systems don’t think like authors, I don’t use them as much as they jump to the left of the page, not to the beginning of the sentence. A line and a sentence aren’t the same in programmer minds, I don’t yet know how to get around this, so they work there.
I call it ‘Glyph’ and I am sure it can be tweaked, but I’m basically using it in this current incarnation with Karabiner, and I’ve posted the JSON files up on a GitHub page so anyone can download Karabiner-Elements and import 4 JSON files and use it if they’re someone who works with a lot of text, aren’t interested in vim and emacs, and are intrigued by not having to use a mouse.
Here is a link to the GitHub page for Glyph where the JSON files are kept, with some more instructions on how to enable it.
The July/August issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine has a short story in of mine called “In the Halls of the Makeshift King.” As some of the reviews below point out, it’s one of my more philosophical pieces, less pew-pew-pew than people expect of me. But it’s a story I’m proud of for being heavy on the interior.
I had trouble sleeping last night, and got curious to see if there’d been any reviews of the story, and rounded them up below because, well, might as well get something positive out of a sleepness night, right? Additionally, I’m trying to enjoy my victories a bit more, as in the past I’d been flying so fast I’d never get a chance to enjoy having a story published.
I put a lot of blood on the page to make this story happen. I am still juggling the fatigue and brain fog of Long Covid, though low dose Naltrexone has gotten me back on the horse, we’re cantering, not galloping. The story was originally written for a very, very gracious invitation to write a story for an anthology that is doing things I wanted to be a part of and was utterly honored to be asked to submit to. But my exhaustion levels meant that although I worked on this for months, and was given extensions, I still missed the deadline.
The editors tried so hard, but I hadn’t gotten on the new meds yet, and it was a challenge.
But I eventually, weeks later, limped over the finish line of the story and started revising it so that it could be sent out anywhere, and I’d always dreamed about having a story in all three of what were the big magazines when my career started (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF magazines were the Big 3). It’s a bucket list item, made even more meaningful by the fact that this was a challenging story written during one of the most challenging times. Thankfully I’ve got more pep in my step, I’m working on a novel and a couple of story commissions right now. I’m still not as fast as I’d like, but I’m writing more now, but this felt like a giant, freaking achievement on a number of levels.
“In the Halls of the Makeshift King” by Tobias S. Buckell (4,928 words) — A pilgrim to the Alcove Above is made Makeshift King and has a big decision to make. The shaft is described slowly and in a way I found hard to picture, but the civilization-level decision foisted on one individual is intriguing.
“In The Halls of the Makeshift King” by Tobias S. Buckell follows Yehin on his pilgrimage. He is one of many pushing a huge capstan that will one day open a door. Nobody knows what is behind that door. As the story circles and we share Yehin’s feeling of futility, we move from frustration to Yehin’s final understanding of the pilgrimage. This is not because he has been chosen to become Makeshift King, but because he finally understands the meaning behind his seemingly hopeless pilgrimage. This tale also rewards the reader’s patience in the end.
“In the Halls of the Makeshift King”, by Tobias S. Buckell, is a mysterious story, only opening up a bit over time. A large group of what seem to be worshippers are engaged in helping to push a massive capstan, that might in time open the Great Door. Yehin is one of these — and now he is facing a radical change in his status … which might (or might not) be critical to the effort to open this Door. I don’t want to tell more — it’s a purposely weird story, and the affect depends on the slow reveal of Yehin’s fate. It’s a fine story, if a bit too abstract for my taste.
In The Halls of the Makeshift King was a near miss in my book, it ended well, but I never felt the environment and the physicality of what was happening, although the philosophical musings were top notch.
During the pandemic I got an email from Jarrel De Matas inviting me to do an interview about Caribbean futurism and the books and stories I’d written. Jarrel has collected a series of interviews and fleshed them out with context and notes, and created a new entry in the Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction series of academic texts.
From the Routledge page:
Caribbean Futurism and Beyond is a tripartite combination of interviews with writers of the sf (speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and folklore) genre, literary and cultural analysis of those interviews within the context of seven discrete yet overlapping dimensions – folklore, mythology, children’s and young adult literature, science, technology, climate disaster, and identity; and a theoretical basis of Caribbean futurism as an esthetic practice reflecting not just future but also past and present experiences of Caribbean people. The combination of interviews, analysis, and theory contributes to the ongoing questions that have been and will likely remain central to being and belonging to the Caribbean. The authors share their creative processes, inspirations, and the unique ways they address Caribbean experiences through stories that expand the boundaries of the genre.
I’m always honored to be asked for my thoughts about this topic, so I’m pretty damn psyched to see this in print. I honestly can say I never expected my work to be studied this way when I started out, so as an English major, always delighted by this.
In the last post I showed how I use Obsidian, a lot of people asked what plugins and themes I used, so I went ahead and created a video that walks you through how to get started with one theme and two plugins to replicate 90% of what I do.
The CSS code to style your text to look like a novel’s is:
/* It's easy in reading mode. */
p {
text-indent: 35px !important;
}
/* Source mode is harder. */
.cm-line:not(.HyperMD-list-line, .HyperMD-header, .HyperMD-codeblock, .cm-line:has(.cm-hmd-frontmatter), .cm-line:has(.cm-meta), .cm-line:has(.cm-comment)) {
text-indent: 35px !important;
}
.markdown-preview-view p::first-line {
text-indent: 35px !important;
}
Just copy that into a text file (like TextEdit, hit Format –> Plain Text and then paste this text in) and save it as whatever.css and put it in your CSS snippets folder in Obsidian and you are good.
Several years ago I became entranced by the idea of a Zetelkasten, a method for linking notes together to create a sort of second brain. I’ve given presentations on how I used an app called Obsidian to create a group of ideas, research, and snippets that allowed me to continue writing stories in the middle of the worst of Long Covid’s brain fog.
But all that time, I was still using an app called Ulysses to write fiction in.
Until the CEO of the app wrote a long blog post admiring Trump and stanning hard for him as a ‘business man’ and I was so disgusted I quit the app and cut the monthly fee.
Which got me thinking, why was I renting my software? Somewhere along the line I just kept going for convenience, and wasn’t paying attention to the bigger picture. And then a writer I follow on BlueSky mentioned using Obsidian to write fiction…
…and it was like a ‘no duh’ moment.
Obsidian keeps notes in Markdown format, so they’re accessible by *any* text reader, and when I switched to Ulysses I got used to Markdown. I was halfway there. And when I showed people Obsidian, I would say “if there’s something you want in the app, there’s probably a community plugin that does it.” So what did I need for a writing app?
This is Obsidian out of the box, and you can see, like Scrivener or Ulysses, it has a left pane with files, and a right hand area you write in. So it could work…
I wanted the source documents to be kept in Markdown. Scivener kept files in a custom format, and even Ulysses had its own modified Markdown, but I wanted my files to be future proofed if a better Markdown program appeared.
I wanted a word counter.
I wanted full screen writing with no distraction via a key combo.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could use some of Obsidian’s features to create things for my novel that I usually put in a spreadsheet.
Many, many years ago, Scott Westerfeld posted how he used Scivener to create ‘pace charts’ for his book, something that really resonated with me and that I did then on paper, and then Excel, but moved to imitating using Scrivener the same way Scott did. Here is the picture Scott has on his blog post about this:
In addition to these items, I also generally keep a half sentence of info about how the chapter starts, and how it ends, as that is information I think important to the structure.
Each chapter gets information, which is technically what comp/sci folk call ‘metadata’ (data about data). Each chapter has data associated with it, whether notes on paper, in one’s head, that I keep somewhere, what if I could keep it in Obsidian?
Obsidian notes can have “YAML” code hidden on the page, anything before – – – in Obsidian can be hidden at the top of the page, so at the top of each chapter, it looks like this as I write:
Invisible unless I click (or type a command quick, which is something else cool I’ll get to) is the data about each chapter hidden away for me:
So expanding on Westerfeld’s pace chart idea, I keep track of some things that I like having notes on. Who is the PoV character? Where is this chapter mainly taking place? Who all is in this scene? What timeline? A summary. How the chapter opens. How it closes. Any stakes? And, because this is a complicated, huge rewrite, is the chapter done, partially has pieces from the earlier draft of some years ago, or do I need to write one from scratch?
I tend to keep the info visible in a small pane open that shows me the hidden metadata in a corner of the program:
So the day to day, it looks like this:
That data allows me to quickly write a small piece of code that generates a really neat outline view that is totally within my control (what shows, what I want out of it). Here’s an overview of another pane I often have open when looking at structural issues in the book. I have here links to each chapter, the PoV is color coded to help me spot clumping and patterns of PoV shifts, locations are tagged, progress ont he chapter is also visible, a quick summary, and timeline and other characters involved are all visible at a quick glance.
This has helped me as I created the structure for the new draft, as I totally rearranged everything in the book to be told chronologically from the set of flashbacks the first draft favored (and sadly didn’t work, creating an immense project in the process. I should drop this book as it’s a monster of a project, but, I can’t get the world and these characters to leave me alone):
So pulling it all together, here is my working environment for the novel In Empire’s Shadow:
The glossary is like a wiki, every new fact I add to the book gets put in the glossary. There’s a map in the lower left, I click on the image and a larger map jumps out to look up stuff.
The chapters I’m working on are in the top middle area, I keep 3-4 chapters open in the left, and the current chapter in the right. The panel in the upper right is a word count plugin for Obsidian. The outline is at the bottom, but often I will open another chapter or scratch pad down there while writing.
To the lower right, a chapter word count log that monitors the words per finished chapter and provides an estimate of the book’s final count (I said it was a big book).
I can trigger a plugin called “Zen Mode” that does this:
Most of Obsidian can be navigated by key commands, so I don’t have to use the mouse much when in it. And it also has plugins to emulate VI or eMacs, which allow for mouseless text editing; I can ‘grab’ whole lines and delete, copy, move them around, I can move the cursor without a mouse and select text without a mouse.
All of that makes it a Swiss Army knife for writers, I think.
I’ve also moved a lot of my writing administration out of Excel and into a Writing Admin dashboard. It’s still in progress, but I am keeping track of submissions, tasks, and projects for my career in there. The complexity of tracking 150+ stories, over a dozen novels, and six collections, means I needed something to help me out. Obsidian has been my second brain.
I’ve been showing people this on my laptop for a year now, and they’ve begged me to write about it. So I’ve finally sat down to screenshot the process and write it up.
You can find Obsidian here. It’s not open source, but shares a lot of the values. And the files are kept as text, so you control them. Download it and play around. Play with some pretty themes, check out some plugins. It costs nothing to tinker with.
Out of the box, the themes show Markdown, I use a theme to hide the Markdown as I write and display the text like a printed book. It’s very customizable!
Update:
I updated the word count feature and the theme of my Obsidian lately to better match my needs. Here’s what it looks like:
I created a word count feature that is a small python script that monitors a folder for any changes to my fiction folder, and logs them in the backround to a CSV file. I then use Obsidian plugin ‘Dataview’ to create charts of the data. Above, I have Obsidian set up with 8 open tabs arranged to show me:
upper left: a wiki like index to all my notes about the book
lower left: a clickable minimap of the world that leads to a larger map
middle upper left: the latest 4-5 chapters prior to the latest I’m working on
middle upper right: Chapter 11, my latest
lower middle: a dataview that scrapes the metadata to show me the outline so I can quickly scan ahead for content info
upper right side: properties of the file I am currently in (shows me things like what PoV, who’s in the scene, what day it takes place, where it takes place)
middle right: chart of the progress of the book, how many words are in each chapter, final edit chapters in green
lower right: the new daily words on the project chart, just started last night, so only two days info
That’s my dashboard for the current novel.
I’m using Primary as my theme, as I fould that AnuPuccin was glitching with Kanban 2.0, a plugin I use for to-do management in other areas. It slowed my Obsidian down a lot, and when I changed themes, it was back to snappy with Primary and I could use many of the same light mocha color schemes as I had on AnaPuccin.
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