Now that I have completed the main task of NaNoWriMo to hit 50k words (up to now, I even have a 2k word buffer), I suppose it might be interesting to talk a little about the set up that I used to work on the novel this month.
For starters, I used vim as my workhorse text editor. I kept a running skeleton/outline of my story thus far, including cast, locations and other relevant information in a file aptly known as idea. It was a very basic set up using a semi-hierarchy system, without any other plugins or things that provided better outlining support. As for the actual novel, I ran two different tools, vim when I was working on Edythe-EEE, and Q10, a minimalistic full screen text editor with live word count and word count target setting, and a clock when I was working on Elyse. I made some modifications for vim on Edythe-EEE though; I remapped j and k to gj and gk respectively, and made sure to unset the textwidth variable. The cumulation of these changes made vim much easier to use to edit ``single-line paragraphs'', since the gj and gk commands allow screen-based movements across the line, instead of just skipping lines (and thus paragraphs!).
I also had a LaTeX source file set up which included the various text files that comprise my chapters. The LaTeX file was set up for A5 paper and would be the means in which I would be typesetting my text. I could have done everything in one file, but the tagging from LaTeX would interfere with the word count, and that it would start to get very unwieldy when all the text of the novel were in one place: the huge quantities of text just makes things unnecessary fatiguing. These were supplemented by a simple bash script that ran pdflatex and wc to get the PDF file of the novel and the word count of the text respectively.
To top everything up, all the files were version controlled using subversion on a space that I had on Assembla, which made synchronising between Edythe-EEE and Elyse an easy task to do.
Maybe I will talk about my inspiration for this piece of writing some other time.
2 comments:
That gj, gk stuff is going to be useful.
So when do I get to read your novel? That's assuming I can somehow muster the patience to make it through 50000 words. I just finished a ridiculous assignment involving tagging the relevance/irrelevance of 10000 documents. That's when I learned those stay-at-home data entry jobs are most certainly not for me.
So, gj and gk are useful only if you don't have textwidth set, since the latter creates auto line breaks as you are typing.
I'll probably put up the first draft manuscript on my main information website once November is done. I still need to actually finish up the story, you know.
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