Made a second attempt at using Muse, having quit and cancelled my subscription sometime late last year when it reverted whole blocks of text to earlier versions with no rhyme or reason and their helpful support staff ceased being so: to not trust a writing tool, no matter how brilliant it is – no matter how close it is to representing how you think – is a death sentence for its utility.

However, in the course of working MainFictionThing (into the ground, perhaps) yesterday morning, I saw the potential benefit it could derive from the spacial thinking canvas approach that Muse offered and, intrigued by the promise offered in the new Mac version and the truly genius interplay of it and the iPad and iPhone versions, I – with fingers duly crossed that the text reversion issues had been fixed – downloaded and logged in and played.

While the genius of the idea behind the app remains intact – and I could see, as in previous attempts, its value in writing not only MainFictionThing but in organizing TSR interview prep and etc etc – I found the text editing options to be still rudimentary at best (though perhaps I've been spoiled by the nigh-limitless abilities of Obsidian and my years now of working in Markdown) which would more likely than not require that I work with another text editor to create the final product (that said, I'm excited that iA Writer 6 will, apparently, add in wiki-linking), and, unfortunately, found further that no matter how much I tried, I couldn't shake my distrust of the earlier release's textual vanishing acts.

Deleted it from all devices of work and distraction by afternoon.

For now, sticking with Obsidian (I have to say here that writing in Obisidian is an absolute joy; thinking in Obsidian... eh) and legal pads and dry erase boards – but damn, do I want Muse to live up to its promise: it's so, so close.

Side note: compiling a list of Obsidian community plugins that have become invaluable to my process. Will share eventually.