I will use revision control. By an accident of history I will be using git.

I will use a text editor. Since I don’t want to have to run into frictions from modal editing while fiction writing, I will be using Emacs.

If fictions were primarily distributed and displayed as plain-text files, I’d be good to go. They aren’t, and I would like to at least attempt to send this higher up the food chain, ending in either a Microsoft Word Document or PDF.

Say, LaTeX makes some nice pdfs. While it manifestly does not suck, and AucTeX is the bee’s knees, I want to do whatever I can in the way of premature optimization to tilt the ratio of writing to formatting heavily in writing’s favor. LaTeX is formatting heavy, so I’d like to avoid that.

Docbook XML also suffers from the same issue. It is a well-specced and quite nice document format. And while nxml-mode is bar-none the premier way to edit straight XML, sorry, it ain’t happening.

So, what essentially plain-text formats can I convert to either LaTeX or Docbook XML, which I can then use to produce my output format of choice? As of this writing, I see three viable options:

• org-mode
• muse-mode
• markdown and pandoc

org-mode ships with emacs, and is great. Writing novels in it would be orthogonal to its original purpose in note-taking and agenda-organizing. It only exports LaTeX/PDF, not Docbook. While it may work, I think successive options are more promising.

muse-mode is designed from the ground up for publishing, not note-taking. It exports both LaTeX and Docbook. This would probably be my first choice, except for one thing: its wiki syntax.

It seems asinine of me to start complaining about a wiki syntax now. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of this exercise, to find a wiki-like syntax I can convert from? Right. I’m not complaining about a wiki syntax, I’m complaining about this wiki syntax. All in all it’s not necessarily a bad one, but it is a domain-specific language for this mode only. It enjoys no reuse outside of this particular application. If the third option didn’t exist, I’d probably use it anyway.

But we have markdown, and the magical frobnicator that frobnicates markdown into a potpourri of other formats: namely, pandoc. Markdown mode is pretty handy, and I’ll probably end up writing a simple minor-mode or git-hook bash script for automating the pandoc conversions.

I’ll let you know how this turns out.

In the case of zombies, the term “undead” is used to refer to them as a collective whole, as a race or species. “Nondead” is less appropriate, for while it would convey the fact that zombies are far more ambulatory than the normative deceased, it fails to convey that the zombies were once dead; or, if it does convey that, it does so with much less force.

(Another example of this connotation, although one based in marketing rather than in organic etymology, holds for “uncola”; 7up has always been a carbonated sweet water, and therefore a cola, although it subverts the usual formulae for what is deemed as cola, and in so doing is perceived [due to intensive advertising more than anything] as having progressed from a state of being cola to a state of being beyond cola.)

The utility of the “un-” prefix used in this manner cannot be overstated. For clearly, the undead, while no longer deceased, also are no longer living. The simple addition of this prefix drums up a word for a third state of being.

My current reading pile includes a heaping helping of Austrian Economics. I love this stuff. A sense of economics on this scale rewires your brain circuitry (what a crappy, ubiquitous brain-as-turing-machine metaphor) in subtle and not so subtle ways. It is some of the best non-fiction reading I’ve engaged in in years.

I have to lend these books out. I simply must. I’ve attempted to get others interested in them, with a little success. My brother, who is reliabel in returning books I’ve lent him unread, raved about Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto, which got me started on this kick. I’ll next lend him Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. And I’ve gotten better about lending out other sacred cows; after the Watchmen trailer hit the web I lent my copy to a friend at work.

The realization, which has been slow in coming, dawns that I’ve read book X once, and the odds of me rereading it in the next few years are pretty slim. I can, therefore, safely risk the copy into the hand of others, where they can better and more frequently fulfill their functions as books. A book is at its best when its being read, when a man is bending his soul to the shape of another’s thought. The more capital I can pump into the marketplace of thought, the better served the consumers of that capital; not humanity, but flesh-and-blood humans. I’ve a couple books, mostly reference, that others can read only in the confines of my abode, but they are now the exception rather than the rule.

I don’t wonder that GTD is so popular online. It really is the ultimate self-help cottage industry. Promises of satisfaction for engaging in bite-sized tasks with Pavlovian-addicting rewards (productivity!) and a requirement for some physical products (book, labler, etc.) add up to a healthy economic niche.

I spent 45 minutes watching foxtrot and tango videos on youtube yesterday. This wasn’t nearly as mch fun as the ballroom dance classes I recently completed.

I have, in my stack of notecards, a couple tasks that cannot be broken down into any further smaller, more manageable chunks. They start with words like “Research” and “Draft”. I usually just work on the ones starting with “call”, “reply”, and “check” instead.

If I had an accurate brand, my logo would be of a slowly-leaking tire, doing most things right, but heading for reinflation or replacement.

I fear the most worthwhile thing I’ve been doing in my spare time is rereading Jane Eyre.

One thing she said that struck me: “Everyone says it’s lots darker than Batman Begins. I hate that. It’s not dark, it’s sadistic.”

In one sense, she’s right. It is sadistic. But the sense in which she’s right is incomplete. The Joker is sadistic, not the film. He is a twisted sadist whose mere presence should have given the film an R rating. But the film doesn’t glorify that evil, it exposes it. It presents a glimmer of hope and a dash of martyrdom in the face of such evil.

And what evil it is. The Joker embodies depravity detached from sanity and given free reign to deconstruct everything and everyone around him. And by deconstruct, I mean either blow up or bring to despair.

My mom had another point: “Won’t portraying that evil push some people over the edge?” Perhaps, but it is their choice to follow the siren song of evil. The film is structured in such a way to make it clear that there are many and profound negative consequences for allowing yourself to embrace that evil. Two-face dies, spiritually in his rampage and then actually. Batman, by way of contrast, has long ago learned to live with his grief and not succumb to the temptations of despair. The contrast clearly highlights that the evil is not to be trusted or embraced. Good clearly triumphs, to the extent that it can given the horrific, 9-11 scale circumstances.

I’m considering catching a third screening, partly to let it sink in one more time, and partly to see it in IMAX. And in choosing whether to, I do need to take some of my mother’s concerns into account. Art does affect us, powerfully, deeply, and there is a legitimate risk of responding improperly to art. And such art should play only a minimal role in our lives. One of my criticisms of the character of Father Ruiz-Sanchez in A Case of Conscience is that he didn’t read scripture or the divine office nearly as much as he read Finnegan’s Wake. Art was taking up an unhealthy chunk of his life, likely because he gave himself over to some aspects of the work that he responded wrongly to. But the work as a whole needs to be considered, not just the villain. And you can’t allow a work of art to push you over the edge.

That said, most data are crap. If they’re not inaccurate then they draw your focus to teh wrong thing. Instead of basing your decisions on what it is you’re actually doing, you’re basing them on a reading of the effects they had the last time you did them.

The above is exemplified in web statistics. Say, for example, that you start blogging. You’re shouting into the void on a regular basis, and then BAM! someone links to one of your pieces, and you watch your stats shoot up. The tempting thing to do is write a similar piece on the same topic. AND YOU WOULD BE WRONG.

What worked the first time? Writing something you wanted to write for the sake of writing it. The second time, your ulterior, utilitarian motives will work against you.

I was spurred to write this by this tweet, with which I completely agree. On the one hand, blogging is a conversation. On the other, it is shouting into the void. There are no guarantees that anyone will click your way, or read what you’ve written once they get there. And if that’s your focus, well, maybe you’ll get the links, but you’ll have sold out. I’m not condemning selling out, it has its time and place, but there is a reason people sneer when they say “he sold out”.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is: goodbye Google Analytics. Goodbye data. If you need me, email works best.

If I ever want a smoke, it’s because I’ve an itch that needs scratching, and a cigarette seems like the shortest path to itch relief. It never is though. There’s a deeper underlying reason why I have dry skin. The itching won’t abate until I eat my vitamins, or eat animal fats, or stop eating melons, or get new genes. The rest is vapid style.

There’s so much style to smoking. Nowadays it happens outside. Always with the lighting it, holding it in your fingers, sucking on it, occasionally looking at it. It’s the perfect excuse to take a break, because who would deny an itching man his scratch? And it can’t be done indoors. So it becomes a paradigm shift. An opportunity for a moment. With friends, huddled against the cold and the itch. Or alone with the itch.

There’s that kind of moment, and then there’s mortal peril. That innocent girl, tied against the tracks, kicking her petticoat. The mustachioed man behind the bushes, twirling his handlebar with growing glee as his dastardly design is about to bear fruit. And our clean, upright protagonist, whose white teeth shine brightly in his favor as he strains against inconceivable odds to ride his worthy steed to the rails in time to throw the switch, sending the train on a different path, the one without a buxom beauty. The thrall of potential defeat in the moments before improbable success.

Catharsis. You can relax now.

In those moments, either smoking or rescuing a blossom of virginity from the jaws of death, in these moments are birthed a potential writer.

There is no such thing as a Greek muse, but there is such a thing as a moment. Live through enough successive ones with a tolerably observant eye, and one will feel, think, experience. And that will either need to be processed or dismissed.

Writing about it can scratch that itch. But the root cause will be here until judgment day.

I don’t even especially like Ginsberg’s poetry. Give me Hopkins any day. But the torrent of measured fitfulness poured out as a fruitless libation, sterile poetry stank with death, demise, burrowing in little rat holes for faint hope; well there’s more there there than the internet, right? A goodly bit of the tubes piping bare flesh into bare hands and barren hearts, the rest amalgams of news, quizzes, pokes, wanton squealing over shiny things, and poor people mortgaging themselves on the next turn-key SEO keyword whitepaper build an audience dropship four hour solution (run on index cards, of all things). Well of course Ginsberg’s deadbeat doped out strung hipster buds and their very real suffering has more life than that. Life takes time. Poetry takes time. The tubes steal attention, the grist of living. Time bandits. Attention pirates. Design masquerading as art. The shocking parading as feeling. This pause pretending to be an ending.

I proceeded to burn the Emacs keybindings into my brain and fingers. I developed some slightly inefficient workflows (copying and pasting from text documents into OpenOffice documents, editing the original text file based on whatever page length I was going for, rinse and repeat until paper is produced) that were, on the whole, a net gain due to the speed of typing without mousing. The linux filesystem positively danced under my fingertips. I had more control over my system than I had ever had on Windows.

I progressed to producing documents and drafts in LaTeX. While it’s a bit arcane, using Emacs with AUCTeX made writing LaTeX arguably faster (and certainly prettier) than writing in Microsoft Word. My long-held desire, though, was to learn a programming language (I chose python) and code my own Content Management System. Events in meatspace have conspired against me acheiving that goal up to this point; now I am making progress. I can’t imagine working in any other editor. Oh wait: I can. I switched to vim for four months earlier this year.

Yes, I tried Vim

You heard me: I tried vim. My main motivation was a bout of Emacs Pinky. My left pinky occasionally gets sore if I spend too much time on the laptop. At the time I attributed it to the control sequences that Emacs uses, but now I’m more aware that it’s just that my laptop has an inelegant and potentially harmful keyboard. If I use an ergonomic keyboard with Emacs, I’m fine.

Vim was fine. It’s a great text editor. If you want a powerful text editor, your two choices are vim and Emacs, and though I prefer Emacs, I won’t fault you for choosing vim. It does some fantabulous things. You can script it in python, for example. But scripting vim in python feels a lot like scripting Emacs in python; there’s a lot of cruft, and it doesn’t play well with the innards of the system like elisp does. And there were all these little things that I missed.

What I’m Doing With Emacs Now

I’m evolving into the type of person who tries to do as much as possible inside Emacs. Here’s a partial list of how I use it now:

• Email client
• Personal Planner
• Coding environment for my as-yet-unfinished CMS
• Twitter
• Writing Fiction
• irc
• limited web browsing (mostly online APIs for the python libraries I’m investigating)
• World Domination

Okay, I really haven’t used Emacs for world domination yet. But as I was reading The Golden Age, I was slightly disappointed when he was naming some of the far-future self-aware AI characters, and Emacs didn’t make the list.

In 2001, I was a freshman in college, which meant the closest thing to highspeed internet that I had hitherto experienced. Which upped my time surfing the web. One of the delightful sites I lighted upon was Ftrain.

One day, I dug through Ftrain’s archives and found Emacs Notepad. I was intrigued. Having exclusively used Word (and Notepad to edit HTML – ha!) up until that point, this Emacs thingy sounded fascinating. I downloaded a Windows version right away.

I soon found that the Windows port of Emacs was stuck on version 19, and the rest of the Emacs-lovin’ universe was using version 21 on some posix-compliant operating system. I decided to hope and pray that soon the Emacs developers would take a little time out to help us poor souls using Windows.

It was a long wait. A long wait in which I could not get LaTeX to work. So long, in fact, that the next fall, with the aid of a new dorm-mate, I dual-booted Red Hat 9 Linux.

What’s great about Emacs, and about free software in general, is that I have as much control as I desire over my computer. I haven’t taken the time to install Linux from scratch, but if I wanted to, the tools are there, and there aren’t any proprietary hindrances or DRM snafus to thwart my progress. My limited ability to understand maths may hinder me, but my software isn’t.

So actually, I am indebted to Emacs for not only making my computing life much easier and more productive, but from freeing me from the limitations of Microsoft. Although I see I didn’t really describe just how it has made my computing life easier, or more productive. I’ll have to remedy that in a future post.

DISCLAIMER: I never said it was a good story of a man and his favorite text editor.