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Operating System

Linux Mint
I just wanted an excuse to put this here, but also, it’s useful to note in case I throw out some application names that aren’t available on Windows. As I pointed out in a 2024 blog post, Windows rubbed me the wrong way for a while, and I finally had enough when I realized I was really only running it because of a few video games. Then I deleted and reconstituted my Windows partition with a certain sense of satisfaction.
Are you guys still running Windows? Ew.

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Word Processing

Obsidian
Obsidian is a journaling / note-taking app that uses bidirectional links to help you connect your information. You can bring up a nifty graphical view that’ll show all your data points and how they link together. That drew me to the program in the first place; however, it’s absolutely not how I use it.

Around the time I was discovering this thing, I was also looking for a simple text editor like Xed or Notepad, but with the ability to use bold and italics. I realized that one of the nice things Obsidian was doing was acting as a file browser for a ton of markdown files. Markdown, for those of you who don’t know, is a simple text format that uses some characters to tell the markdown editor to show features like bold and italic.

I was already keeping my notes in folders on my work-drive on lots of simple text files. So once I fully trusted this app, I migrated all my stuff over. So now I have all my scraps of simple text at my fingertips in a convenient file explorer.

Aside from my notes and such, I write my rough drafts here. It works well except that I found (to my annoyance) that the app can only display so much info in a single file without generating visual errors. So I had to split my latest work into a file per chapter. But this is how most of the online text programs work, so it’s not too bad. I wrote the rough draft of this blog post in Obsidian.

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LibreOffice Writer
Microsoft Word has become the unofficial standard writing tool. The generic Linux version is LibreOffice Writer. Thankfully, it’s built to handle all the Word features I need as a writer.

So when my work in progress is ready, I’ll move the whole thing into a *.odt file and move the margins around so it looks relatively like a novel and start editing. I learned from the first book that it pays to keep this file as my master file, which is copied over to other services. Because running your book through a website and back has a tendency to eat formatting. I foolishly had to sit down with my first book and copy over the missing bold, italic, font changes, etc by hand more than once.

By making this document the master file, it’s easy to hand over to an editor when the time comes.

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Editing

ProWritingAid
I use ProWritingAid so you guys can’t tell just how awful at spelling and grammar I am. You can only get so far trying to make your way through a document trying to make all the red and blue squiggles go away. So I get more in-depth help there. I use it to sharpen up my blog posts to be as professional as I can manage in a short timetable. And I use it to sharpen up my manuscripts until they're ready for a pro editor.

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Formatting

Atticus
My formatting tool is Atticus. It’s built in a way that you can use it as a word processor as well, but I already have that covered. So I just use it for its formatting abilities. You can use a preset or define your own style and apply it to the document. Quotation mark style, first paragraph capitalization options, fonts, horizontal rule style, and more. Plus, you can set the print size for all the popular sizes, and they even tell you which print sizes are available from KDP, IngramSpark, and Lulu.

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Website

Webflow
I’m using Webflow to create my author platform (website, blog, and eventually selling books) Honestly, it’s a bit much for my small business, and when the annual bill comes up, I wonder if I should downsize.
It’s a little technical, but not so much that I can’t handle it. I need to redo the blog because it’s becoming large and needs organization. This is pretty easy though; Webflow keeps all the blog info in a little database (products too) and you can have the website dynamically serve up your database entries.

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Word lookup

Artha ~ The Open Thesaurus
I’ve been using this one for a few years now; I just have it load at startup and I can quick-draw it when I need to look up a word. Type a word in, and it gives you the dictionary definition, and then you can look at synonyms, domains, and derivatives. That kind of thing.

PowerThesaurus.org
From time to time, Artha doesn’t cut it, and I jump on this website to find a very comprehensive list of synonyms.

LMStudio
One thing I’ve been dabbling with is running an AI while I work. LMStudio lets you give your chat session a prompt. So I set it to act as Igor, my little book bug mascot. So when I log in to work for the day, I’ll greet him and he’ll role-play flying up to me and saying hello. But since I have that window open, I’ll just throw in there something like, “Igor, give me a bunch of synonyms for blank,” and he’ll rattle a bunch off.
It’s also fun to take what I’ve written for the day and plop it in the chat window and get its opinion. AI are usually overly enthusiastic, so it has a tendency to note what I’ve put down as sheer brilliance. But getting immediate feedback has gotten me to see flaws occasionally. Often enough to keep doing it.

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Images

For my writing, I don’t have that much need for image generation, but I use this a lot in my blog and my quarterly merch designs, so I’ll start with the stuff I used to make my cover and then talk about the others.

MagicStudio.com
MagicStudio was the only online AI art program I could find that didn’t require you to make an account before fooling around with it. So I used them. The art it generates is a bit dated and bad if you compare it to the cutting edge, but it worked well enough for me to generate some clip art to make into a cover.
I recently downloaded Invoke. AI art’s complexity annoys me when I compare it to text-based AI. But I’ve got it going.

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Krita
I was never much of a Photoshop guy and certainly wouldn’t be after they changed their business model to a subscription. But it doesn’t play well with Linux, I’ve heard, so I tried out GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP for short. But it really didn’t work for me, so I looked for alternatives and found Krita. I was thrilled with it, and now it’s my go-to art program.

Canva
I learned that Canva is great for making art for your business. Book covers, ad images, and such. So I tried it. I don’t own any fonts, so this was a convenient way to get access to a library of fonts I can use. It’s a web-based app and has some powerful yet simple controls.

KolourPaint
And for a very basic editor, I keep KolourPaint around. It’s basically a clone of the old MS Paint program. Sometimes you just need to slap something together or draw yourself a picture of what’s happening in your book to keep it straight in your mind.

Inkscape
This is a vector graphics program that has come in handy for making art for my print on demand store. (LINK HERE) It’s especially handy for making a gigantic file. If I tell a sophisticated program like Krita to make an image at, say, 10K x 10K pixels, the program would struggle. For Inkscape, it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience.

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Note Taking

Keep
I keep 3x5 memo pads on my desk for those sudden ideas you have to jot down in a hurry. And the cardboard covers come in handy if you need to squash a bug. But as for apps, I use Google Keep to jot down all my notes. I let them build up in there for a while, and then I transfer all those notes into my work in progress, or add to the accretion fields that are my future book ideas.
I find Keep handy because I’m already signed into Google on my phone and PC, so it’s available in all the places I want it and it’s easily available.

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Final Thoughts

One of my gripes with all these programs is how many of them utterly struggle and die when you try to feed them too much writing at once. It blows my mind that in our modern age of computing that I can only flawlessly do stuff with an entire novel's worth of text when it’s in a very basic format like in Notepad or Xed.
Programs like Word and LibreOffice Writer can contain a complete book, but the longer it gets, the more the program struggles.
And beyond that, almost all the other programs need you to cut the book into chunks (I go with chapters) otherwise, they just break down and time out. I find that especially frustrating because they don’t always tell you up front. You learn it be ruining the program’s day and having to struggle to recover your work.

Looking over these tools made me realize I need to break off some time to work on the business side more. It’s just so much easier to jump in and get going on my book. I’ve got the rough draft about half done now. I hope my progress will be pretty consistent now that we’re moving into summer. It was a gray, nasty winter, and I felt some significant brain-drain, which really slowed me down.

(Note: I am not affiliated with any of the products, services, or companies mentioned in the article.)

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Like with the NES, my family would visit video rental places, so I got to experience a wide range of SNES games that way. New stuff that I might like to buy and weird stuff I wanted to try out but probably wouldn’t like.

As I mentioned in the last I, Gamer. I sold my NES, which was a blunder, but the upside was that I could now utilize these kinds of stores to get my hands on games cheaper, make my meager kid money go further. It became common for me to buy used games and play them for several months before taking them back to the store where I got them, only to do it all over again with another game. Sort of a prolonged rental, except that I kept the good stuff.
These used game stores led to the next three topics

Game Genie

I found a SNES Game Genie and codebook. The book was pretty beat up, but I fondly remembered using the Game Genie to make my old NES games do all kinds of cool things. In the back of the codebook was an ad for ongoing subscription services. So I did it and collected a small pile of updated code books.
But with the SNES Game Genie, I quickly ran into a problem that I didn’t have with the NES. Different versions of the game. Turns out not all the codes worked on all versions of the game. A problem I’d never run into before. The SNES Game Genie was fun, but I didn’t use it much. I also never made up any useful codes myself. I usually just succeeded in ruining the color palette or sprites, making the game weird or hard to play.

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The Super Scope

The Super Scope was the SNES’s light gun game. And it came with a cartridge of sample games, Super Scope 6. I tried this one out and quickly tired of it. Resting the thing on your shoulder was much more awkward than playing with the NES zapper. Handguns are intuitive.

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Mario Paint

Another find at a used game store—this one I kept. Mario Paint was like a supercharged graphics program that could do all sorts of things: allow you to create simple MIDI music (something people still do today). Make images, simple animations, and play some simple games. To make all this possible, Mario Paint came with an old ball mouse and a hard plastic mouse pad.
Kind of a funny story. Mario Paint has this thing where when you idle too long, the game will shout “Hey!” I remember being home alone and taking a break to grab a snack, minding my own business when I heard, “Hey!” I froze and then started peeking around the corner, looking for the source of that voice. Finally, when I was looking out the window, the TV did it again, and I realized it was just a strange idle sound.

Multiplayer

With the SNES, I played multiplayer much more often. Not only did I have Super Mario World and Mario Allstars which gave me a wide range of 2-player platformers. But I was also a fan of the Top Gear series of games and fighting franchises like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

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I fondly remember staying up late playing Top Gear 3000 with a friend until I could barely keep my eyes open. I’d start the race and then black out, then I’d take an elbow to the ribs and wake up on the edge of the track with a jacked-up car. In my defense, it was a long game, and we probably should have jotted down the code and quit. But sometimes it was hard to get those passwords to work right.

Another thing I mentioned in the NES article was Nintendo Power magazine. This is the era in which I let go of my Nintendo Power subscription. I had a two-foot-tall stack of magazines in my closet, and Issue 114 sat on top of the stack for years. Part of the problem was the internet. I had become accustomed to going online and looking up game trailers. And when it came to tips and tricks, I could find that information online faster and easier.

Ultimately, I look back on the SNES fondly. I think it’s my favorite Nintendo console. It’s either this one or one of the future consoles that I haven’t talked about yet. While early 3D graphics aged terribly, sprite-based graphics look classy forever. That, combined with the sound and controls... it left a lasting impact on me.

A couple of years back, I hooked up my SNES to play all my old games again. I made it a point to play through Super Metroid again—one of my all-time favorites. I moved past my old saves from back in the day and started a new file on save three. After a couple of sessions, I looked at the save game screen and realized that this was all battery-backed up memory, and that my save data was approximately 30 years old!

Speaking of favorites, I figured I’d just make a list of them to end things off:

• Super Metroid
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
• Megaman X
• Kirby Super Star
• Top Gear 1, 2 & 3000
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4: Turtles in Time
• Mortal Kombat 2
• Tetris Attack
• Super Punchout
• Star Fox
• Super Mario World

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Hey did you know I wrote a book?

‍Walk Amongst the Stars is like The Hunger Games and Ready Player 1 collide, but for adults.

Pick one up and help me survive this cyberpunk dystopia.

https://www.danielsevenwriting.com/books-audio

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Back on January 30, 2026, there was a post on Brandon Sanderson’s YouTube channel where he walked an audience of convention attendees through his thoughts on Ai and how it pertains to art.

The conclusion he came to is that what matters about art is how you grow and change as you make art. Which he summed up succinctly as, “You are the art.” He points out that the piece of art you create is the receipt that proves you went on that journey. And that Ai doesn’t do that, it skips straight to making the product.

Last month I already had a blog post in the works, so when I watched this video I felt inspired and started writing in Xed, the Linux version of Notepad. I promptly forgot about these notes, and only when I sat down to brainstorm a blog post did I remember them.

I find that I agree with his core message...

I’ve experienced it myself as I wrote my first book. From the dabbling stage all the way through to the release of my book, I kept feeling a sense of leveling up. My skill at writing novels hitting a whole other level, again and again. And the feeling of holding that finished paperback is so validating.

Since the day I sat down and thought about how I was going to go about this author career, I looked at the contingency that I wouldn’t be able to create a sustainable business. And in that case, I plan to keep on writing in my free time because I find it so fulfilling that I wouldn’t want to give it up.
And in the same vein, even if I could use Ai to magic up a book based on my writing prompt... I wouldn’t want to. Because I’d be skipping the good part.

...but not his complete point.

I started writing those notes that night because I felt a little mismatch between how I feel about Ai art and what he said. It seems to me, after listening to his speech, that he’s hoping against hope that Ai doesn’t become mainstream. He says in the speech that society has the power to say no, and I agree. But it seems to me that society has already said yes, emphatically, and we’re slowly coming to terms with that decision.

Since around 2020, Ai has risen to become mainstream. And now it’s currently being embraced worldwide to create music, pictures, video, voices, code, search results, customer service, podcasts, writing, and that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head.

It’s clear the corporate world lusts after the concept of an Ai workforce, with or without robot bodies. And hell, as a sci-fi nerd, I sometimes dream of having a robot buddy who does all the tasks I don’t want to do.

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Synthesis

It’s too late to put the brakes on. Clearly it was too late three years ago when Elon Musk asked Ai developers to put a stop to Ai advancement and come up with some regulation. So what that means for us creative types is that we have a new toolkit we need to learn how to integrate.

For my writing, I don’t use Ai, unless you count running my work through ProWritingAid to fix my atrocious spelling and grammar. But I have dabbled with Ai art and chat. While I don’t see myself ever using Ai to do the writing work for me, I could imagine bouncing my ideas off an Ai while I work or asking it to give me several alternate ideas for a scene that doesn’t work well. Or dictating and having it write the words instead of using my hands.

As an indie writer, I needed an editor to help me sand off the rough edges and polish my work up. If I had unlimited money, I might pay a pro to do every job other than write and edit my latest book. Graphic artist, web designer, promoter, personal assistant, you name it. The only thing stopping me is money. Indie writers start off in the red, so to speak. It would be a massive help if any of these tasks could be accomplished by Ai.

But I believe in the short term, a synthesis of professional and Ai is the way. They have the knowledge to give you a professional job, but the tools to make the job easier than ever before. That should make it possible to get more work done in the same timeframe and offer cheaper prices per job.

Further down the road

What are the repercussions further down the road? I have to imagine that Ai will be the harbinger of doom for many industries and the origin of new, unthought-of industries. I always liked the term Andrew Yang used: the AI industrial revolution. It speaks to how much of a game-changer Ai will probably be.

I’ve heard people prognosticate everything from apocalypse to utopia when it comes to Ai. Who knows what’ll happen, but I think people might have to get used to defining themselves by something other than what they do for a living. I’ve heard talk about how the abundance created by Ai will enrich everyone’s lives. Perhaps I’m just jaded, but I don’t think we live in that world. I can’t imagine any newly created abundance going to anyone but the dragons of our world.

And who knows, maybe given time people will become good at writing books with Ai.

Also, I can’t help but look at the evolution of this technology and see the potential to augment my intellectual property. It would be massive for me to easily turn my books into audiobooks and translate them into other languages. Why stop there? Not everyone likes to read, so I could make them into point and click adventure games, or animes and movies.

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