Tell Us About Your Writing Set Up

[Amontillado]

At work, our only note-taking app is (sound of herald trumpets) OneNote. A mix of notes and to-do items is a handy thing.

Unfortunately, OneNote has never been able to reliably find unchecked to-do tags. It's a widely reported thing that Microsoft just gets away with, much as it did with its kite eating tree of a Word feature, master document mode.

Rebellion is my specialty, fortunately. I can't install software on my company system but I can copy text files to Linux hosts.

And so, for the first time in my professional life, I installed vimwiki, which gives vim wiki powers.

Vim, for those who have a life beyond dot matrix printers, is a text editor. The text editor, some would say. Nine out of ten geeks who speak grep agree, vim is the undisputed king of editors. Except for emacs, of course.

I'm surprised how much I like vimwiki. It's fast. I can edit files outside the wiki if I want. It's ugly, by post-1970 standards, but it's very effective. My workday life is running fine in a text-only ssh session and vimwiki.

 

[hirundine]

I forgot to add that I keep a bunch of sticky notes and a pen on my trolley at work so that I can write down any ideas I have and then get back to working.

You would be amazed how many plot holes I've filled that way.

 

[defaux]

You would be amazed how many plot holes I've filled that way.

Filling plot holes with sticky notes might seem a bit flimsy...

 

[Tallyfire]

I have a laptop with Ulysses (Mac only), which I really enjoy. It lets me go full minimalist blank white page for free writing but also lets me quickly access my many notes… because if I don’t make notes on when/why/where the characters are doing what I quickly lose track.

You are not alone! I do most of my writing with pen and paper on my writing desk. I have a collection of fountain pens, stationery, and ink that I rotate through to keep things interesting.

Monteverde Innova Formula M, 1.1 mm stub nib, Diamine Oxford Blue.

So happy to see some fountain pens in here! I journal with fountain pens in a Hobonichi. Monteverde looks nice but I’ve yet to try them. My favourite right now is a Platinum 3776 with a soft-fine nib (such a delight!), but the Estie I just got is a close contender for that spot.

I'm surprised how much I like vimwiki. It's fast. I can edit files outside the wiki if I want. It's ugly, by post-1970 standards, but it's very effective. My workday life is running fine in a text-only ssh session and vimwiki.

Everything from fountain pens to… vim. Respect. I’ve resorted to Nano when confined to ssh. Vim always drove me nuts.

 

[Amontillado]

Everything from fountain pens to… vim. Respect. I’ve resorted to Nano when confined to ssh. Vim always drove me nuts.

You are too kind.

There are many paths to enlightenment. Nothing matters but the words. Nano is a great editor. I use it in the Mutt email application where Nano is the default editor. Nano is a monument to ease of use.

If you ever need to learn vim, type vimtutor at a shell prompt for a nice quick start.

 

[JT Woody]

well... i was outside, on my lawn chair at the table. big umbrella and a nice breeze. was out there since 11... then down came a big black spider with a yellow spot on its butt and i freaked out. i jumped up, snatched my laptop and ran inside (forgetting my house keys out there on the table). made my husband go out there to get them and watched from the window. the spider was trying to make friends with the little yarn animal keychain i had on the ring because when my husband picked up the key, he immediately dropped it and the spider spread itself over the yarn animal.

long story short.... i got my keys back, and i'm setting up a new writing spot on my couch
(1,412 words before i was so rudely interrupted)

 

[JT Woody]

i recently acquired my husbands old Lenovo IdeaPad.
I'm now sitting here with my document up on my laptop (one of the many tabs....), and the google doc with beta read comments on the IdeaPad. Now i can scroll through the comments and edit on the doc at the same time.

(I have dual screen at my job which makes looking at 2 documents at the same time super easy. hence me firing up the old Lenovo for at home-dual screen action)

 

[Amontillado]

Ok, things just got serious. I've got a cool new broadaxe tucked in my belt.

Mellel is my word processor of choice. By far. Your mileage may vary.

One feature I haven't make use of in Mellel is something called story points.

The idea is you can, if you want, build an inventory of characters and locations. Whether or not you do that, you can drop story points in your document.

Story points are pretty much bookmarks with extra commentary and you can list what characters and locations are involved with each story point. If you want. You don't have to get that detailed.

One of the things I like about Mellel is it's very future proof despite using a proprietary document format. You can export to docx, epub, pdf, plain text, and probably a couple of other formats, but Mellel's native format is very easy to read without using Mellel itself.

Tonight I wrote a few lines of Python. My little script will scan a Mellel document for story points, characters, and locations, and write a comma separated file suitable for input into Aeon Timeline.

But, of course, Mellel's story points are simplistic. You can set a date, but no ending date.

So, my script scans the remarks (comments) for each story point. If it finds a pattern like enddate(value goes here), it will add an enddate column to the output, filling in the value from each story point that sets it.

I can have story arcs, observers, participants, and any other event data I want fed to Aeon from Mellel.

Tomorrow, I'm going to add an Aeon tag to each line of the Mellel output, something like FromMellel. That way I can select just the timeline events that came from Mellel and delete them in Aeon. Re-importing from Mellel would then pick up timeline changes I made in Mellel.

Pretty cool, I think. What amount to comments in Mellel will build a timeline, no effort involved.