So, NaNoWriMo 2011 is far, far over.

Before the NaNo kicked in, I recommended people to check out org-mode and look at my ramblings on my endless struggles with other writing software packages.

That ramble was a little bit premature because I hadn’t actually completed a major writing project with Emacs. I’ve written a lot of short stories over the last year or so, but due to my increasing self-critique I’ve not actually gotten anything out. And, of course, the fact that I kept switching software probably didn’t help much either. =)

But NaNoWriMo is now done, and bashing out 51,757 words probably counts as some sort of an achievement that gives a little bit of an indicator of how Emacs works as a prose writing tool.

I told people it would work, and dammit, it did. Except for a few small snags.

Somewhere around the previous post, I made an outlandish promise that I might try out Celtx to see how well I could write a story in the “novel mode”.

I think I have to take it back. Because Emacs foiled that plan.

And I still can’t believe it.

Emacs as a prose editor. Bah. Pigs are flying.

It’s that time again - time to rant about software!

All I’ve learned over the past few years is that developing writing software sounds deceptively easy, yet no one seems to get it right.

One of the reasons I like open source is that vendor lock-in is less likely. Often, open source applications are built on open file formats and open standards, and files can be edited in different applications. The reason people stick to specific applications is that they happen to work for them. There’s something in each app that makes them suitable for specific tasks. This is not always optimal; for example, currently OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice is the best implementation of all OpenDocument features (i.e., if you want metadata and templates to work properly, you use these applications, because other applications are likely to mess things up), but if you want to just get access to the file content, there’s plenty of applications that read ODF files and can write ODF format files.

But there is one application that illustrates that you can get into vendor lock-in hell in open source world.

(Damn! I should blog more often.)

I have been using MediaWiki for my character/world notes so far, and it seems to perform very adequately. Semantic MediaWiki is an awesome enhancement that makes MediaWiki the best damn information organisation tool ever.

However, there are certain things that could make it much easier to use SMW for organising information about fictional entities.

I've been looking for a word processor that might work better than OpenOffice.org Writer for the purpose of writing fiction. I have a rather haphazard list of features that I deem necessary, and I really should write them down some day.

That said, so far it seems that TextRoom is the best software I've found. It's still far from perfect, but it looks like a good try.

In Sunday, I finally finished "Once it's rolling...", a story that has been in works for a while. You can find it here in Avarthrel website, in deviantART and Scribd. Soon, hopefully, also in Elfwood.

This story has been in works quite a while. It started off as a story for my planned Flash-Fiction-a-Day 2 effort. Turns out the story just kept growing and keeping it in "flash fiction" size was not going to cut it. Some other stories also showed similar potential for hugeness, and one story ended up as a part in another story.

This is also a testament to the fact that next time I get the bright idea to improve my process and rebuild it from ground up, I think I'll reconsider it. This story was produced in relatively short amount of work, using plain old OpenOffice.org Writer. My hacked and patched-up LaTeX workflow just wasn't good enough: OpenOffice.org Writer, despite of its deficiencies as far as process goes, is actually pretty good as a word processor. I just need to figure out a way that would convert the OpenDocument file into clean HTML, then into weird hacked-up sorta-kinda-HTML some of the websites use, then into Markdown for my own website, and finally to LaTeX for PDFs. I'll have to hack together some XSLT when and if my head can take it.

Also, good news on the story front: I discovered "memoir" LaTeX document format, which produces some awesome results in fiction front, and I don't need to knife the "article" document format that much any more. Also, I figured out why TeX wasn't producing PDF metadata (it should be done via hyperref parameters) and how to use XeTeX for maximal frigging font-related awesomeness. Please see Scribd or the PDF version of the story on the website to see what it looks like. I'll probably re-do the rest of the stories using this document format when I'll get the chance.

The only big problem with this thing is that you can literally spend hours getting the output just right, hence such a late blog post...

...or, putting the Murder Simulators to good use.

So what do lonely people do when they don't have friends to play with? Fire up their Nintendo Wiis, Create Mii characters of people they obsess over and go play Wii Sports or whatever, happy to see that the other characters are cheering them on or playing in the same team. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating the geekiness - a) I am a geek, and b) a lot of people who actually have a life do that too, so it's actually good fun for the whole family! So here I am, turning my painstakingly created characters into Miis...

From left to right: Cassandra, Facyr, Faira, Gnedrnygr, Quirierle

Well, as far as I can tell, these guys look pretty close to what I'm envisioning them. Not perfect, of course, but recognisable, and that's what really matters.

Just a random quick note: Apparently, in a fit of random weirdness, I managed to publish Conman's Dictionary source code on github. This is the dictionary application that I've used when developing the Avarthrelian brand of elvish language. I'm not sure how cool it will be, but I hope it will be useful!

Happy new year and all that.

Regrettably, my brain seems a little bit cramped these days so I'm not writing much. But I have one story under development, and it seems to work pretty well so far. I'm also pursuing yet another interactive fiction project - and it seems to be working pretty nicely too.

Anyway, to the real topic...

StorYBook seems like a rather nice piece of software. I'll just say it has one pretty damn obvious flaw: while I first used it in the holidays, the most recent version was 2.1.9, and when I got back home, it seems a new version, 2.1.10, came out - a version that incidentally forgot about all of my side characters and seems to have completely messed up the chronological view. I'm sure that's just a temporary bit of confusion and I'll eventually figure out what went wrong.

But otherwise, it seems like a really interesting approach in coming up with characters, locations, and various plot strands, both chronologically and sequentially. It seems to have little quirks still, but it will undoubtedly rule one day. I'm sure this will eventually be of great help when I finally pause and make sense of the horrible mess of notes and prose that begs to be rewritten.