TiddlyWiki - A Revelation

TiddlyWiki - A Revelation

I've been radio silent lately on most things related to fiction writing. I've been the occasional review on food and whatever movie and TV show I happened to have words about, but as far as fiction goes, I've been dead. That has primarily to do with pulling in as far as publishing for the public and instead focusing inward.

So what that means to say is that I haven't stopped writing completely. Editing has been slow on Expansion Expression, but my focus really hasn't been attuned to it. It's been on the formatting of the other books and on a massive personal project I've always wanted to do.

That project has been creating a cohesive internal wiki of notes and information. I have an excellent memory so I don't need to write down much of anything, but having a few notes and wiki allows me to keep track of canon details and plot out well everything.

How I'm creating this wiki is by using TiddlyWiki, a program for taking notes and other stuff. It is very low key, which is what I like about it. I could have used something like Emacs org mode I suppose but I'm allergic to deep tech stuff on my own time. Which is why I use WordPress and now TiddlyWiki. It's low maintenance and has a low learning curve. I don't have to try to use it, is what I'm saying.

I can easily create pages like this:

Baune Entry

I can link between pages, add images, and do other styling to suite the information. It's robust.

So that's what I've been doing: adding to my internal database. I started really last summer but I didn't really dig into it that much. Now I've been going all into it and it's been greatly expanded. It's comforting knowing I have something coherent if I need it. Having to deal with junk documents and spreadsheets written by myself years ago with bad formatting was a pain. With my wiki, it's mostly polished and accessible with a simple search.

It isn't the most 'exciting' activity, but it forces me to explore the details of corners I haven't visited in a while. It's a very cathartic world building activity. Exploring nooks that really ought to have been. Figuring out a character in a perspective that maybe I hadn't considered before. Just generally getting a better feel for everything. Creating more.

That is what I love–not necessary the writing, but the creating.

That's my passion.



Related/Recent Posts