December 23, 2025
This post is fully available on Patreon, but as the first post there, it's a freebie
Intro
This is the blog-y part of the article. If you only care about the actual setup, skip to the setup section. Unless you're on Patreon, which is the only platform where that part is available. Just know ahead of time that I tested my setup on Linux (Nobara), macOS, and Android. I ditched Windows when it became an AI-infested, Ad-ridden garbage OS, and I encourage you to do the same.
I started drawing when I was a little kid and, weirdly enough, I got really into cars for some reason (nowadays I am only mildly knowledgeable of them, don’t own a car, and don’t have a driver’s license ).
Drawing simple cars evolved into robots, then human characters, and by the time I was eleven or twelve, I got into comics. Naturally, I tried my hand at writing my own comics, and I like to think that they were better than the average amateur kid comic. I colored and lettered them in Photoshop using a cheap Genius graphic tablet, and even exported them into .cbr format files.
Somehow, this writing part of the process got excised into its own hobby when I changed schools in eighth grade, and my literature teacher told me I got a knack for writing (In hindsight, she was just being nice and trying to find common ground with a pretty antisocial kid, but this event tilted the axis of my life forever). Around that year was the first time I started reading literature for fun, a habit which I would abandon for some years until late high school.
My first novel attempts were done on a thick ruled notebook using a ballpoint pen. I would start this one idea I had (which I no longer remember), over and over. I wrote in my native language back then, not English, and I wrote faaast. Not because it was in my own language, I got exposed and spoke so much English that now I think in English when I use it. No, it was because I was at that early point on the Dunning-Kruger slope where I thought everything I wrote was gold and I was God’s gift to literature. This came to bite me in the ass later when I started second-guessing everything I wrote after getting disillusioned with my lack of progress over the years.
I moved to Microsoft Word for a brief stint, returned to pen and paper (bought those travel agendas that are supposed to inspire you to write more - they don’t), then switched to Google Docs when I started writing on my phone.
My Google Docs homepage, when I used that platform, was a real cemetery of ideas. I had tens of false starts there, ideas I would obsessively return to, again and again, over the years. At one point, during college, I wrote a seventy-page draft of a spy story called Hermit Crab, about mindjacking via a headset-like device. It had a twist similar to Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters. I felt pretty proud of it back then, and in hindsight, I was right to feel like that, for finishing it, a feat that, at the point of writing this article, I am yet to reproduce (yet determined to).
Sometime in 2020-2021 I got it in my head that I kept starting and abandoning projects because I wasn’t planning ahead, instead only writing first chapters in the heat of the moment after getting an idea that got me excited, only for that excitement to fizzle out and to find myself the next day staring at the document and wondering Now what?.
That’s when I convinced myself that I had to do the worldbuilding first. My Keep folder was full of motivational crap and rules I wrote to myself, like I already knew what I was talking about, but I felt like I had to hold myself to them (I didn’t). It was around that time that I started using Scrivener in parallel. To be completely frank, I… ahem, I didn’t buy it, although I had all intentions to do so eventually. No, I sailed the high seas, writing on Google Docs the draft, keeping a big spaghetti note on Google Keep, and using Scrivener to keep track of the character descriptions, locations, and organized notes. The scrivener files I would backup on Google Keep, usually writing mostly on my phone in Docs and doing cleanup and backup at home.
That was my setup until this year. I moved most of my accounts and workflows (mail, calendar, notes, docs, etc) from Google to Proton. That’s when I did a big manual backup and went through that cemetery of projects. It was a feeling of both helplessness and nostalgia, seeing all those years of trying to be a novelist, all those ideas attempted again and again. That first novel draft I completed? I cringed so hard going through it, I nearly cracked my teeth. It wasn’t even that long ago that I wrote it; it was a 2019 file.
I felt a bit silly. Why do this? Why keep at it for so long? You never had any formal training for this. Do you need it? Hunter S Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby to feel what writing a great novel feels like. I never even bothered to take an online class on writing. Was I trying to prove something to myself? Who knows. I resigned to the thought that I wanted to see this dream of mine come true, this dream of writing and publishing at least one book.
I used Proton for a while, and while I stuck to their mail and calendar services, I dropped the paid drive subscription and their horrendous and underbaked docs implementation. As I said, I write the most on my phone, and the best they offered was a browser interface. That wasn’t gonna cut it. Also, I was very dissatisfied with not having Scrivener on my phone. I knew a mobile version existed, but I didn’t believe it was fully compatible with the desktop version. What’s worse, whenever I saved a Scrivener project, it created all sorts of files and deleted many more, filling my drive’s recycle bin with a bunch of crap on every save, whether I input more text or not. Yeah, the years-long trial period was over for me, and I realized I hated Scrivener too.
So what is my current setup?