(2021-11-16) How Obsidianmd Replaced Video Games Helped Me Publish

Eleanor Konik: How Obsidian.md Replaced Video Games & Helped Me Publish. Every time I consider opening up a colony simulator like Rimworld, or an ARPG like Path of Exile, or even a survival horror game like 7 Days to Die, I realize that the part of those games I really enjoy are inventory management and tweaking automations.

it’s the same part of my brain that enjoys moving information around in my notes, or fiddling with my templates to optimize them.

clearing out all of my tags.

Each tag represents something I need to do.

If I’m too tired to create content, or don’t have anything pressing, or am just stressed out and want to feel like I’ve accomplished something, I’ll often start going through those tags and “clearing” them. (digital gardening)

I’ve somehow stumbled into gamifying the act of organizing knowledge for myself

I blog a lot more

no matter where my brain is at, I’m always working on something in the “ecosystem” of my end goal: supporting a career as a speculative fiction author.

I finally had enough notes in one place to become professionally published as a nonfiction writer

ultimately, I wound up not doing a lot with my stories… until I stumbled across a newsletter article on substack talking about how people were serializing their novels on newsletters

I don’t really write short stories — I tend to write things even shorter than that.

I spent some reflecting on what kinds of things I talk about at science fiction conventions and parties with my friends and decided that the thing that made me interesting was all the neat stuff I stumbled across doing research for my stories.

Before Obsidian, my newsletter was a once-a-week offering that was only about 10 sentences long. Most of the value was in the links. But once I started connecting and synthesizing things

I had all these stories I was writing as part of Twitter events that I couldn’t use for anything, and couldn’t really share with anyone who was interested in my fiction because, well, who wants to buy a .99c book on Amazon that consists of only 280 characters?

I could write about it on my blog, but my blog was already full of stuff, and sort of messy, and, well, to be blunt, these days RSS is pretty niche and more people read newsletters

Besides, most of my worldbuilding articles on my blog are pretty formal, and “evergreen” in that they’re directed at being resources for other authors. They tend to run long, too, sometimes 3,000 words

From a technological perspective, it was actually easiest to sell the fiction and supplemental “afterword” as a premium offering to the existing newsletter.

I write a LOT more.

Since finding Obsidian, I have written something — a note, an article, a blog post, a newsletter, a story, something — every day. Back when I still used Scrivener, I would often go days or even weeks without opening the program

Obsidian is always open, and when it’s not, it opens fast — even on mobile, as long as I don’t install too many plugins. I can easily switch between modes of thought, and different moods, without losing the thread of doing something useful and enjoyable.

I’m not yet making the “bare minimum pro rate” of $.08/word

but for the first time in my life, being a professional author feels attainable

The Tools Matter

I should have been this productive with Scrivener, or like I should have been able to take notes just as good with plaintext files long before Obsidian came onto the market.

The fact is, Obsidian’s feature set — and community — is uniquely suited to how I have been trying to organize my notes for years. The way it subtly pushes me to write more “atomic” thoughts is one of the reasons I started prioritizing my short fiction. The way it lets easily me trace connections between research and stories, and different storylines, is one of the reasons I’ve finally started integrating old ideas into the worldbuilding.

Sometimes people ask me why I pay for Ghost to run my newsletter on

There are a variety of reasons I’ve made this choice, but a big one is that Ghost supports a philosophy that puts the website and the emails on an even playing field, and lets me control navigation and styling in a much more intuitive way than substack does

Besides, the things I’m doing with Ghost just aren’t possible on other platforms.