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.

“Why? What did I do?”

She was laughing too hard to be taken aback. “What do you mean?” Snort.

“If I was too funny, then I wasn’t just the right amount of funny. When did I cross the line?”

Her hysterics subsided. “I’m not sure.” She instinctively reached for his hand.

“I simply showed you the comic, which I thought was simply funny, and then reiterated that I like the man in the last panel would be thinking about how the bear might defend himself from…”

She interrupted. “Don’t, you’ll kill it,” she said, her face drawing down into a pout.

“But I thought I did kill it; I went too far.” He very nearly looked her full in the face.

“Now you have.” She actively avoided his stare.

“So I hadn’t before?”

“I was laughing my fool head off!”

“But you said I was too funny.”

“God!” she blasphemed loudly enough for other passengers to hear. “Did you not catch the emphasis you just repeated back to me? You’re too funny doesn’t mean you’re excessively funny, just that I find you very funny.” She lightly punched him in the should; he was oblivious to it. He was too busy thinking.

“Oh,” he said after a while. “I think I blew it.”

“Yes.” She was looking straight ahead. “Yes you did.”

“I suppose now isn’t the time to talk about marriage then.”

“I suppose not,” she said. “I thought we were going to have a nice discussion about it.”

“On a bus? Because I showed you a comic strip?”

“Why on earth must you always do this?”

“Do what?”

“One minute you’re hilarious and then you’re still huggable but then you’re still so serious about everything it just… you eat moments like zombies eat brains.”

“Unthinkingly?”

She burst out laughing and whacked his chest with her purse.