Fifty years ago, I was a brilliant, misunderstood novelist. At least, that’s what I told myself. My office contained three thousand index cards, seventeen miles of colored string, and a wall that looked like the FBI was investigating my sanity. I smoked to concentrate, drank to relax, and did both when I couldn’t remember why I’d killed off a character who was supposed to appear in Chapter 12.

Fifty years later, I’ve discovered Obsidian.

Now my characters have personalities, my plots have structure, and my ideas connect across dimensions I could previously reach only with a generous Scotch. I’ve traded pushpins for knowledge models, colored yarn for intelligent connections, and my drinking problem for a metadata obsession. My mind has never been clearer. Admittedly, I still occasionally forget why I walked into the kitchen. But I can now keep track of an entire fictional universe.

My friends and family probably prefer the new me. I’m less grumpy, less depressed, and considerably less likely to spend dinner arguing with people who don’t exist.

But I hadn’t anticipated something.  Back then, when I was hopelessly lost in my own confusion, my characters would gather around me. They brought their flaws, misunderstandings, impossible ambitions, and terrible decisions. We’d argue about the story, about life, and occasionally about the state of the world. I’m not sure who was helping whom. They were certainly less organized then. But sometimes I wonder whether they were more human, whether all that confusion gave them a little more of the real world, a few more flaws, and perhaps a little more depth.

To tell the truth, I miss my old self.