Tom Ghostly is a concept that flows through time and space. Tom Ghostly exists in many ways and in, if you like, many spheres. He exists as a ghostly boy in the novel »Beachlandia«, but the means by which he writes there or contributes to the creation of the text is left for the novel to tell.

But Tom Ghostly is also an entity that in our world is largely congruent with the person Thomas Peak, who takes great pleasure in telling us how he writes, however insignificant his actions may be. He prefers to talk to himself about it or trumpet it into the empty space that surrounds him, where his words drift around like pastel-colored space debris until they fade. Nobody hears them - and nobody sees them either. That's why he writes about it here, because what he writes here stays. At least a little longer. He thinks he's writing about it as Thomas Peak, but maybe it's Tom Ghostly. Not the Tom Ghostly of the novel, but the one from reality. Although they are the same at times. So they say. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

»Beachlandia« has grown so incommensurably large, so much so, that one of the two has devised a system to tame the ever-flowing streams of thoughts. After years of filling hundreds of pages of notebooks with fountain pens, ballpoint pens and pencils, and after trying out a wide variety of software from Evernote to Obsidian, he has arrived at a workflow that largely ... works.

Apple Notes

For Tom Ghostly, Apple Notes is a great, great blessing. As of now, Tom Ghostly keeps a single file in it called bl_notes which holds hundreds of notes. This file contains all the wild thoughts, associations and excerpts that Tom Ghostly comes up with. He also makes specific notes on what he still needs to change in some chapters of the novel. Or which ideas he wants to pursue more consistently in the following »Beachlandia« volumes.

To prevent the file from becoming as convoluted as his notebooks, which he has worked his way through time after time after time when in search of a specific and important note (despite having a good visual memory and also keeping an index), he has come up with a tagging system. This would allow him to tag notes according to the respective protagonists in the novel, who most often are relevant for the specific note, so that he would come up with #BL_LOU, #BL_LEMONA, #BL_FLANDRO and so on. Furthermore, he also tags by the volumes, he has planned, for example #BL_I, #BL_II or #BL_III, especially when he is relatively certain that a note will be of relevancy for this or that volume. And lastly he also keeps a list of names for upcoming characters under #BL_NAMES, collects chapter ideas under #BL_CHAPTERS or ideas for quest items under #BL_ITEMS. The tagging system is relatively self-explanatory and can be shown or hidden at any time in the left sidebar.

In addition, he can generate the current date and time at any time using a macro that he inserts into the text, namely “;date”, so that he always knows approximately when he jotted down which notes. This is helpful if he no longer is able to recall what exactly a note was about, but remembers vaguely when he wrote it. Then he can use a full-text search to find the relevant month, for example.

The great thing is, that Tom Ghostly can click on one of the tags in the left bar and he can jump through the hits displayed in the document. The problem is that the hits are not displayed hit by hit as in a PDF document, but that he has to click his way through the hits one after another, which is not ideal with 60 hits, for example. He has therefore created a script with which he can instantly export the latest version of the note file to a PDF at the touch of a button, which is automatically saved locally and also serves as a backup. He can then use the MacOS Preview app to search for the entries in a much more appropriate way. Sometimes Tom Ghostly wonders whether the better way to handle this would be to set up the note system in Apple Notes so that each entry is saved as an individual file, then he wouldn't have to take the detour via the script and the preview app. He knows that he can change this at any time if he wants to, because scripts can split his file into hundreds of small independent notes. That is very reassuring.

Devonthink Pro

Because many of the inspirations Tom Ghostly stumbles across comprise entire books or text documents, Tom Ghostly additionally needs a way to manage his literature database, similar to academics who spend many years working on a PhD. However, what he needs is not so much a reference manager like Endnote, Mendeley or Citavi, but rather a digital database for literature that stores and indexes hundreds of books for him so that he can search the entire database for keywords, entries and the like using a full-text search. This works in a similar way to a local version of Google Books, only much more specific, which is absolutely essential.

Screenshots

And yet—without screenshots and downloaded images, very little would work. Whenever Tom Ghostly comes across a source on the internet that stimulates his gray matter, i.e. when he comes across something that inspires him or possibly provides ideas, he downloads the images or takes a screenshot, wheter those are graphics, video players or websites. Over the course of weeks, something like a tsunami of inspiring material can accumulate, so every two weeks at the latest, he sorts through it, meaning he moves the image files by hand to the respective folders in the Photos app (only after they have been compressed using a shortcut on the iPad or iPhone.)

It's well worth the effort, especially as his brain is often a blank slate. He then scrolls through his folders in the hope of finding something to write about. Or at least something to stimulate his phlegmatic brain. Where else would he be, oh, where else would he be?

Last words

On and on Tom Ghostly keeps telling himself that he didn't write this blog entry solely because he is secretly inclined towards self-expression or even -promotion, but because he hopes that this entry can help others to manage knowledge databases, for example for similarly complex novels. Then Tom Ghostly would be what they call a good soul. Even though he probably doesn't even have one. Just like sin.