Writing Workflow

Until recently, my writing workflow had been pretty simple: on a laptop or iPad, I wrote novel length stuff or collected works in a binder in Scrivener, and for shorter pieces, I wrote in Pages. These both synced with my desktop, an iMac, and that was that (except occasional corrupted files from Dropbox in scrivener. Dropbox is nasty like that).

I've since been trying to expand out the ecosystems I'm on. I love Scrivener, it's a powerful tool for writing cohesive projects, including exporting the projects to an eBook format, or now to a Velum format for better eBook formatting. But it's Mac and Windows, and importantly, won't work on my Raspberry Pi 4. The RPi has been a toy to play with, but the built in VNC software lets me remote in from anywhere (I'm on a computer outside my house right now, remoted in), and suddenly I have a little writing focused box that I've wanted for a while.

So, how do i make this work?

Experiment 1: syncing with git.

Much like markdown, I feel like a lot of people try to make github be their everything. This worked for a bit, but the process of checking in changes and pushing up to a master was cumbersome and not what I wanted to do every time. I have an abandoned github account now, so that's fun.

Experiment 2: ghostwriter and Dropbox, via SyncThing

This was a world of hurt until I figured out how to get SyncThing running properly. I got pretty happy with it, except that eventually I found that Dropbox would cause some of the programs and apps I used to absolutely freak out after a while. So this I had to abandon too.

Experiment 3: Obsidian with Obsidian Sync

As much as I am loathe to add yet another subscription on to my life, this works pretty well, and I can run it truly across platform: Mac, Windows, Linux, including ARM64 for the RPi (running on Ubuntu MATE install), and iOS. Setting up vaults for syncing is just a little goofy, but it works, and that's what's important.

So with this personal project I've been working on, my workflow has been draft in Obsidian, and when that draft is done, copy and paste the text into a Scrivener binder. From there, I have a lot more control over how I work with the text and where it goes. Plus, it's nice to have the built in redundancy, just in case.