Something happened towards the end of 2025, and I’ve managed to find a bit of a rhythm to my writing, pushing the draft of project Dreamcatcher north of 38,000 words. It’s not exactly a sprint, but after years of this project sitting on the back burner, it feels like the momentum is finally shifting in the right direction.
The turnaround really started in December. I spent a good chunk of that month organising the infrastructure of the story. I realised my Scrivener project was becoming a bit of a mess, so I decided to move the entire story bible over to Obsidian. Having the two separate—Scrivener for the manuscript and Obsidian for the world-building—has helped clear my mind.
Scrivener is much leaner now, and having multiple different versions of my notes across various software and cloud platforms (in addition to Scrivener and Obsidian, I had some stuff in OneNote and even some notes in Dropbox Paper and in random Word documents) finally consolidated into one Obsidian vault has made the whole process feel less chaotic. I don’t need to spend brainpower trying to remember where I left my notes and which notes are actually up to date.
(Also, Obsidian is amazeballs for linking together notes so that I can quickly see connections I would otherwise miss.)
I wrote roughly 9,000 words during 2025, possibly my best year of writing yet. (I know, it’s terrible, but it’s a nice turnaround.) At the start of 2025 my draft was at about 27,000 words after eight years of pondering, trying, failing, writing, editing (way too much) and generally just feffing about.
After my big tidy-up in Scrivener and Obsidian I wrote about 3,500 words in just a few days, making it my best writing month in a very long time. Ten days into January 2026, I have increased the draft word count by another 2600 words to 38,000 and change, in addition to having deleted and rewritten a fair amount of already drafted stuff to account for a few small changes in the story’s direction.
Now, I’m going to be a bit controversial…
A big part of my progress the past month and a bit has come from using AI as a digital thought partner. I know there’s plenty of noise surrounding AI in creative arts, and I’m firmly in the camp that says using it to actually produce art or “write” a book is a bad thing. A story needs a human soul and perspective that AI just cannot provide. However, I’ve found AI super useful for brainstorming, research, and getting feedback on the run.
I know, AI cannot really invent new things. But it really is a good brainstorming partner to bounce ideas off of and get feedback. Some of the stuff it throws back at me is gold, but most of it is mediocre. The main thing is, I interact with my AI brainstorming partner with that in mind. A lot of the stuff the AI comes up with is decidedly meh, but it stimulates the creative juices and gets me thinking up ideas for my story at a much faster pace. I even use it to create scene and character sketches, which helps me visualise the world. Like the feature image for this post. It’s a great way to stimulate the imagination and makes the process feel less solitary—like I’m not doing this completely alone.
These first ten days of January have been a bit of a lesson in juggling time, energy and creativity. It hasn’t been some gruelling, heroic effort; it’s just been about showing up. Some days that means a solid session of near 1000 words in just an hour, and other days it’s just a token effort of a 12 words to keep the streak alive. I’ve also realised that on days when I’m stuck, engaging with the story—plotting a scene or developing a character—is a valid alternative to writing, though I have to be careful not to fall down the slippery slope of just rereading and editing what’s already there.