A few people have asked me for more details on my writing process so I figured the easiest thing is to document it here. This about the literal process of how I put together my projects.
Editor
My main editor these days is Kate. Kate is a plain text editor but since it’s part of the KDE project it comes with a huge number of slick features include vi mode (vi is an unbelievably powerful editor once you make it past the learning curve). I use LaTeX markup for everything (more on that later).
Project Structure
Each project gets its own folder (current project is named “hammer” due to an old work working title). Each chapter is split in a couple files but how many depends on my mood when I worked on that particular piece (you can see in the above screenshot that the chapter is split in four files: one for each of the three scenes and a fourth to put them together). Files are named with a one-letter prefix based on the act (A, B, or C), a number (the chapter in that act), and a short name describing the point of that file. Each act has its own file that puts the chapters in order (named part‑A.tex, part‑B.tex, and part‑C.tex).
Generating Output
LaTeX is a pain to work with directly (it pollutes the working directory and has no dependency management) but CMake solves both of these problems. CMake doesn’t support LaTeX out of the box, but I hacked together a module to manage LaTeX projects.
create_target(wolf-A "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}" "${tex_files_A}" FALSE)
create_target(wolf-B "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}" "${tex_files_B}" FALSE)
create_target(wolf-C "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}" "${tex_files_C}" FALSE)
create_target(wolf "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}" "${tex_files}" TRUE)
create_target(wolf-pub "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}" "${tex_files}" FALSE)
create_target(wolf-lulu "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}" "${tex_files}" FALSE)
create_target(wolf-scrib "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}" "${tex_files}" FALSE)
The first four lines let me produce manuscript-formatted output for either the whole novel or individual acts, the bottom three produce typeset content, typeset content for a 6″ x 9″ page (per the requirements on Lulu), and individual chapters (for posting to Scribophile). The main targets I leverage are the first four, mostly because manuscript formats build much faster than non-manuscript formats.
Using LaTeX means I get lots of slick features when I generate the typeset output, including kerning, hyphenation, ligatures, old-style numerals, and micro-typography (this adjusts things like the spacing within words and overflowing into the margins to get whitespace that looks uniform to the human eye). Both typeset and manuscript forms leverage LaTeX features like the csquotes package (automatically manages quote matching across languages, including nested quotes).
Each target can be built in pdf, html, or odt. I can also generate “full” versions which include some post-processing on the output, but that’s only required for the full manuscript (required to generate Special Characters).
You can compare chapter 2 of The Howl of the Wolf in both manuscript and typeset formats.
Tools
I use apsell for spellchecking and integrate it with cmake using a custom command.
add_custom_target(spellcheck)
foreach (file ${spellcheck_files})
add_custom_command(TARGET spellcheck
COMMAND ${ASPELL} -t -p ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/aspell_dict check ${file})
endforeach(file)
If you don’t speak geek, this runs the entire project through aspell using a custom dictionary isolated to that project. My current plan is to delete the dictionary and run a clean spellcheck before publishing (just in case I accidentally added a word by mistake), but for now I can tolerate a few spelling errors.
I have a few scripts to help with analysis and file management. The most obvious example is word counts (splitting chapters/acts across lots of files makes this hard).
sh ../chapwc.sh A-00 3015+1+0 (1/0/0/0) Total A-01 3688+0+0 (1/0/0/0) Total A-02 2920+0+0 (1/0/0/0) Total A-03 2471+0+0 (1/0/0/0) Total A-04 2412+0+0 (1/0/0/0) Total A-05 2718+0+0 (1/0/0/0) Total A-06 1401+0+0 (1/0/0/0) Total A-07 1117+0+0 (1/0/0/0) Total ...
All changes are tracked using git.
Posting
Before posting anything to Scribophile I run it through Pro Writing Aid to help with grammar and style. If you haven’t tried Pro Writing Aid give it a shot, the site is amazing (it found the exact same sentence being used twice in the same chapter; not similar, the exact same). I usually work through one report at a time, updating my raw files and generating new output as I go to make sure I don’t miss anything.
After going through Pro Writing Aid I check for troublesome words. When I’m done cleaning those up I do one last check through spellcheck and Pro Writing Aid to make sure I didn’t introduce new problems.
Once the sanity check is done I spit out the chapter in html (easier than dealing with copy/pasting through a pdf) and copy/paste in Scribophile.