I finally finished a novel

s4b3r6
2018-08-24T12:30:11Z

I've finally finished writing something. It's been about four years since I actually finished something nicely.

I'm entering the editing phase, which generally takes longer... But I'm a bit excited.

Hopefully this is an acceptable thing to talk about, and I'm going about things the right way.

So... To spin off into discussion, here's two things:

A part of the story:

The ground rose up and struck Raul in the face.

He blinked, stumbling backwards, seeing his master standing nearby.

The old man was glaring, his hands clutched around a brightly coloured stone.

Raul opened his mouth to question, but the old man was whisked away to a distance hillside, and the boy found himself tumbling head over heals backwards down a hillside.

He scrambled onto his knees, staring as he found himself on the shore of the lighthouse.

His master placed a solid hand on his shoulder, and muttered gibberish.

Raul glanced up, but found himself staring at the light of the lighthouse.

Spinning.

A bright light, round and round.

Lightning struck him, and Raul screamed, stumbling backwards.

The rod lay in front of him.

He tore his gaze away with effort, and saw his master, hands outstretched, the stone of red, gold and silver floating between them.

Almost as astonishing, the stone was clean.

A hammer hit him between the eyes.

Raul found himself stumbling behind his father, watching as the old man struck stone, separated it, revealing the river of solid copper within it.

"Boy!"

I'm hoping I've got the grammar at least semi-right. My illness means I can forget words, or my brain can replace words at random with others that it thinks are related.

Any guidance or critique is welcome. (I'd give a bigger quote... But this is probably more than enough to discuss.)

The build script I'm using:

#!/bin/sh

set -e

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo 'Please provide an output file name.' >&2
  exit 1
fi

tmp=$(mktemp)

echo 'Building...'

cat title.txt > "$tmp"
echo '' >> "$tmp"
cat LICENSE.md >> "$tmp"
echo '' >> "$tmp"
cat Prologue.md >> "$tmp"

for file in 0*.md; do
  echo '' >> "$tmp"
  cat "$file" >> "$tmp"
done

for file in 1*.md; do
  echo '' >> "$tmp"
  cat "$file" >> "$tmp"
done

echo 'Converting...'

pandoc --toc "$tmp" -o "$1" 2>/dev/null

rm "$tmp"

echo 'Done'

title.txt is basically just YAML markup for pandoc. The other files should be fairly obvious.

I'm silencing pandoc's output, because I make use of a self-reference to add comments to the Markdown, that get killed by the parser and never make it to the output:

[//]: # (This is a Markdown comment. Isn't that cool?)

However, as all the references point to themselves, pandoc warns.

I'm using pandoc this time around, because it produces fairly clean files. I've used GitBook and Calibre in the past, and though the ebooks they produce work and look okay, the amount of crazy markup they produce means the books lag on some ereaders.

However, that does make a lot of back and forth. Building, checking output, rebuilding, etc.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~creative/5ij/i_finally_finished_a_novel

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