Creating the Project: Midnight Vault

I didn’t get around to creating a vault for Project: Midnight yesterday, so I thought I’d bring you along as I create it today.

What is Project: Midnight?

Project: Midnight is the code name I’ve given to the fantasy(ish?) series I’m working on. It was originally called The Midnight Sisterhood and then I changed it to The First Seer and now I’m calling it Project: Midnight because I should probably settle on a plot before I settle on a title.

What’s a Vault?

A “vault” is Obsidian terminology, and it refers to the highest level folder that contains all the other files and folders within it. Each “vault” only accesses the files within that vault, so it’s great for managing specific projects. Any folder on your computer can be a vault, provided it contains markdown files.

For our purposes today, I’m going to create a new vault, which will simply create a new folder on my computer. Anything you do in Obsidian will be reflected in your files manager. Anything you do in your files manager will be reflected in the vault that manages those files.

One of the reasons I love working in Obsidian is that if Obsidian ceases to exist tomorrow or the Internet goes out, I can still access all my files and open them with any program that reads text/markdown.

Creating a vault is as easy as giving it a name and choosing a location.

Et voilà! We have a shiny new vault.

Obsidian has a lot of different themes and plugins and ways in which you can optimize your workflow but for my purposes today I just want to set up my content.

I usually start by creating a “00. Liminal” folder. This is where I keep all miscellaneous files pertaining to a vault. I call it “Liminal” because I like that word more than “miscellaneous." 😆

Let’s add some more folders.

Since Project: Midnight is something I’ve been working on for a long time in some form or another, I have a lot of different bits of content spread out under different titles and folders, which gets very confusing when I’m trying to find something.

For the next stage in the process I need to go through all the files that are scattered in different locations and figure out what’s still relevant. For example, there are files with character details that no longer apply.

When I find a file that I do want to keep, I just drag it over to the new vault and plop it under the corresponding folder.

I also found a note about fungal networks that I’ll want that note to link to. One of Obsidian’s super powers is the ability to link files together. So it’s like creating your own private wiki.

Let’s fast forward to some time later …

Okay, now that I’ve found all the things, my folder structure is a bit of a mess. But at least everything that is relevant is now in one place and under the correct project folder.

I will now spend some time going through everything again and organizing it properly.

… time-travel music…

There. My vault is now more or less in order and I have a working story bible for my series.

Thank you for joining me on this thrilling adventure.