About three years ago, I decided to switch careers. I stopped coding, and I started writing my first sci-fi novel. It was going well; in a Google Doc, I had my first six chapters, but I also used Todoist to keep my to-do lists and Vellum to see how my book was looking in print. Then, I started getting lost. This happened because of the lack of proper worldbuilding and because of so many characters, locations, events, and other things that we [authors] need when writing such a huge novel.
I started looking for solutions, and that's when I found out about Scrivener, the king of writing and worldbuilding. I tried its free trial period and gave it a good try before I ended up ditching it. While it's a beast, something about its interface never clicked to me, so I started looking for other solutions. That's when I found out about Obsidian, and after a few months of using it, I shared my own vault online for free, calling it 'The Novelist Obsidian Vault'.
It was cool, it was working, and I was loving every minute with it. As a developer, I could also build my own custom plugins for my worldbuilding needs, and thanks to third-party themes, I had a beautiful interface to work with. But all of that came to an end when my custom plugins started to break after a few updates Obsidian's team pushed, and I had to keep track of their roadmap to make sure that everything would work fine after every new update. Then again, there was only so much that I could build upon Obsidian, and having in mind that I wanted to build a lot of stuff to make it the "perfect" worldbuilding software, I just couldn't proceed with that plan.
So I started building my own app. In the beginning, it was a simple Markdown-based editor that just offered the ability to write and organize chapters into parts. As I continued writing and coding, I added the ability to add and organize my characters, then my locations, then my events, and then even more stuff as I progressed through my book's story, until one day it had everything I needed.
I knew The Novelist had finally become a robust app, so I decided to release its Early Access version to the public. Little did I know, a few months later, that this little personal experiment had its own small team of beta testers. Not long after, it had its first sale, first donation, and so many emails with crucial feedback that I've gotten from the people who were using it.
Right now, The Novelist is still in Early Access, but a lot more robust and improved than it was in the beginning, with tons of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements - all thanks to my awesome community.
As of this moment of writing, you can start writing your book and organize all of your books and their locations, characters, events, organizations, secrets, items/objects, notes, and comments from within a modern and robust interface that you can customize in many different ways. It also offers a bunch of plugins that you can enable or disable with one click, over 18 themes, and a roadmap filled with new features that I'll be releasing in the near future.
Along with that, I was finally able to code the Graph View, which was one of the hardest coding tasks I had to do as a developer, and it works perfectly right now.
Screenshots:
There are also many themes that you can choose from (light and dark mode options available, too), most made by me, and others asked by the folks who've been using the app:
In addition, there are plugins, and you can quickly enable and disable each one with one click. If you don't like, for example, having an AI Assistant on the right navigation, you can quickly disable it - and the same goes for almost any feature The Novelist currently offers.
Since not every author is going to use every single feature and option the app offers, I'm shipping all of them as plugins so you can quickly disable or enable them according to your needs and personal preferences.
I've also been working on partially open-sourcing some of the parts of The Novelist, offering developers the ability to build and submit their own plugins, but that's something that needs a lot of work and attention, so I'll ship it in the future.
Well, that's about it. I wanted to keep this as short as possible - just a quick morning blog post. If you happen to give it a try, let me know how it went and what you like and hate the most about it.
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