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.

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 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.