I’ve gone to great lengths to make writing easier. And by easier, I do mean less complicated and with fewer steps between thinking of the words and producing a finished manuscript. Most of the tools that purport to do that tend to make the process more complicated. Scrivener has too many functions and too many buried features. Word is more UI than productivity tool. Libre Office is trying to be word, so it definitely has too much UI for its own good. Google Docs and other online tools are fine, but they are also not particularly trustworthy these days.

I tried quite a few open source novel writing tools, and they all vastly overcomplicate the process while being janky in new and wonderful ways. For a short time I liked using Wavemaker, but that is a project that will likely never get the love it deserves. I even used VSCode as a writing tool for a bit. Fast, uncomplicated, but also a little like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.

For me, I think that maybe Obsidian hits all the right notes. It’s fast. It’s simple. It’s uncomplicated. It can be modified and enhanced with plugins. I, for example, really like typewriter scrolling. I like that where I type my text just sits in the center of the screen and if I am editing I can read the paragraphs both before and after whatever I am working on. A plugin lets me do that. That’s all part of making writing easier. I don’t even have to scroll the page. The page scrolls for me.

There is a new writing software called Neo that I messed around with. It seems very neat. Very minimal and focused. But it also doesn’t do all the stuff I want and doesn’t run on iPad (which is where I am typing this right now). Obsidian is just there when I want to write. I have it on my PC, on my IPad, and on my phone. I can write anywhere. But I usually just write on my couch or in my office chair.

I just found that someone (Beth Dean) made a plugin to export your markdown files from Obsidian to exactly the form and format that publishers request on their submission forms. That’s one more hurdle eliminated. It makes that process of writing just that little bit easier. I type the words I want people to read, I press export, I submit.

Now if I could just make the opaque gauntlet that is submitting fiction to publishers easier I’d really have something.