Humanity is in crisis, and I don’t know what to do with myself—but I do want to help.
(more…)Coping with Solastalgia
(more…)There’s a name for the mental or existential distress of our environment being changed in unwelcome ways. It’s solastalgia, and I heard it again and again as I traveled through Alaska, from people who could see their home changing literally before their eyes.
Katharine Hayhoe, “Saving Us”
Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — Writing Fiction
This is part 5 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews the process I use to turn my ideas into prose for both short- and long-form fiction. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.
Planning and incubating my fiction is all well and good, but how does that translate to actual words on a page? While the majority of my focus is finishing that one novel I’ve been struggling to pass like a kidney stone for past decade, I’ve also been experimenting with short stories recently, especially since Obsidian enabled me to carry more of my ideas to fruition. The process I use is slightly different for both my short and long fiction, but they follow the same ideological practice of breaking down a large, seemingly impossible task, like “Write a story,” into smaller, more manageable chunks, like “Identify the problem or crisis the protagonist faces.” I’ll also highlight the similarities between my short- and long-form fiction where relevant.
(more…)Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — Fiction Planning and Incubation
This is part 4 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews my workflow for collecting and acting upon story ideas, turning premises into polished prose. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.
Where do I put my ideas?
You know how it goes. You have a “story ideas” journal, or you’re like me and you write everything down in the same Leuchtturm 1917 notebook, but all that seems to be good for is accumulating things you may not ever come back to. I don’t have a good portion of my day to “sit down and come up with ideas,” I just write them down whenever I have them and hope for the best.
Digital note-taking tools promised to help with this, but I ended up just dumping everything into an “story ideas” file that would grow increasingly larger, such that every time I looked at it, I was bored by the same first entries that appeared every time I opened it, and eventually became overwhelmed by the number of ideas I had to tackle. I needed a system that would allow me to seamless drop my ideas into it, trusting that they would resurface later when they felt exciting and fresh again.
Then, once I had an idea that I wanted to develop into a full-blown story, either a short story or a novel,I wanted it to be frictionless to apply some of my favorite story construction frameworks to them. As nice as it would be to have “Write the story” be a single action-item that I could put on my to-do list and then cross out, there’s actually quite a lot more to it than that, and I needed to be able to break the project down into its constituent tasks that I could then schedule out into the future to ensure I actually wrote the damned thing.
Fortunately, all of this is totally manageable within Obsidian, and it doesn’t even take a lot of plug-ins to make it work.
(more…)Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — Morning Pages and Daily Notes
This is part 3 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post details how I make use of plugins like Periodic Notes, Templater, QuickAdd, and Dataview to manage my Daily Notes Page and Morning Pages writing practice. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.
The primary activity I use Obsidian for is writing. In terms of volume of words and time spent in the app, the majority of this writing would actually be classified as journaling. Journaling is what brought me to Obsidian in the first place, the promise of being able to see connections between different entries across the months and years of my writing, and it has certainly paid off to be able to to journal in this way.
Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — From Evernote
In Search of a Better Journal
This is part 2 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews my history with journaling and digital note-taking tools, accounting for how I arrived at Obsidian from my first digital database, Evernote. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.
How to Record Everything?
I haven’t always been so interested in writing everything down, but I have always had an interest in writing something down. When I was in college, I needed a notebook primarily to keep up with assignments and follow classroom discussions. (It was an entirely discussion-based curriculum, and the rules of decorum meant that if you didn’t have a way to keep track of what was said and what you wanted to say, you may never end up participating at all.) This was back when I was an aspiring musician as well, so I soon found myself relying on a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook I carried with me wherever I went so I could parse out song lyrics, doodle when I was bored in school, and write down assignment deadlines.
When I got an iPod Touch, sometime in 2008 or 2009, I installed Evernote, sold on the idea that I would be able to store—and recall—well, everything. That was the promise of the Information Age, wasn’t it? To leverage the awesome storage and computing power of technology to record and interpret data about our world in ways never before thought possible?
Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — Overview and Index
This is the first part of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post serves as an overview and index for the rest of the series, which will explore in depth how I use Obsidian for note-taking, journaling, and creative writing. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.
In Search of a Digital Note-Taking Analogue
What are the primary virtues of analog note-taking? Immediacy, for one. A notebook requires no loading time (aside from locating said notebook,) no power source (if there’s sufficient light,) and creating a new note is as fast as turning the page. Geography is another one. Our brains evolved to remember the relative locations of things, and physical books maintain that sense of space—the pages exist in an immutable order that becomes familiar over time. Then there’s portability. I used to keep a Field Notes notebook in my back pocket at all times, and my current Leuchtturm 1917 notebook fits as easily in my small café bag as it does in any of my backpacks.
But there are some disadvantages to analog note-taking that left me wanting more. While my Leuchtturm has page numbers that enable me to create an index of its, that index is only really useful for that single volume. I’m currently on my twelfth volume, so unless I’m going to maintain an independent index, I can no longer keep track of where all my writing lives. Another disadvantage is impermanence. On the one hand, we still have Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks some five hundred years after his death, but on the other hand, I lost one of my Field Notes notebooks on a bike ride back from the climbing gym and I never saw it again. Thirdly, so much of what I read now is digital that it would be much simpler for me to copy and paste excerpts to add commentary than to painstakingly write down every piece of information I want to recall—and then index it.
(more…)A Quick Word on Scheduling
A few posts back, I mentioned that I would be posting a new essay here every week. While I did enjoy the rigor of that production schedule for a time, it quickly became an obligation that encroached on other projects I so desperately wish to complete. I strayed too far from my original intent for recommitting to my weblog, which was more to share my work process than grasp at finished thoughts to share.
In the interest of finishing the projects I have prioritized, I’m going to reduce my publishing schedule here to once a month. That will give me time to reflect on my process, progress, and share some thoughts that pop up along the way.
Thank you for your flexibility as I navigate the challenge of balancing priorities.
Parenting on the Internet
Introduction
As you can probably tell, I don’t post about my son with anything but the broadest of strokes, and there are no pictures of him on my social media profiles. This is both a difficult choice and a deliberate commitment. On the one hand, I think he’s beautiful and wondrous to behold, and I want to share everything he does with everyone I can. On the other hand, I think there are some real and compelling downsides to posting his early childhood online, especially before he can consent to having intimate details of his life shared so publicly. I know I can control privacy settings to somewhat regulate who among my friends and followers sees what, but that’s a relatively minor concern to what really bothers me about it.
Ultimately, I have to make decisions about what I think is best for my son, best for me, and, where I can, best for the people who exist outside of us. Documenting life via social media has its costs, it has its effects, and I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze in this case. There are a few reasons why.
(more…)
Explaining Santa Claus
I’ve probably got another year before I have to start answering questions about Santa Claus, but I don’t want it to catch me off guard. My son is almost two and a half, and while he asks plenty of questions, they’re grounded in the physical present and haven’t yet turned toward the abstract. Plus, he barely knows about the concept of Santa Claus. Over the Christmas holiday, we rode the Holiday Express train here in Portland, and it was a lot to adjust to even without the addition of Santa and his elves. My son had never been on or near a train before, so that was a surprise, and (thanks to the pandemic of the early ’20s,) he hadn’t been around such a large group of people in an enclosed space before.
When Santa came through our car, he wished us a Merry Christmas, offered my son a candy cane, and asked if we’d like a picture. The toddler just stared and Santa moved on—the guy playing Santa is used to little kids, and they don’t experience wonder at meeting Santa under a certain age. And my son hadn’t received any presents from Santa yet, so he didn’t have any personal association with the man.
(more…)2022-01-08