Comment by sketerpot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sketerpot | Hacker News Reader

Winning National Novel Writing Month. I know that NaNoWriMo is in November, but I reserve the right to change February into another November in my personal timeline. I just have 618 words left. I've never written anything longer than about twenty pages before, and no fiction, so this was really a new and exciting experience for me. To my surprise, the book is actually pretty fun to read; I was expecting it to suck. I didn't know that any of this was even possible for me. This really has been an amazing month, and I look forward to doing it again when the official November comes around.

(On a more nerdy note, none of the existing word processors really felt right to me, so I'm using a text format of my own devising, a python script to convert it into TeX with the memoir document class, and emacs. And org-mode to handle the story notes. It's remarkably pleasant, and it was a fun way of procrastinating. Much like writing this post.)

Good for you :) please post it when it's done. I got a chuckle out of the python/Tex thing - I was chatting with a friend recently about how we both want to start writing, but none of the writing apps feel right, if only there was a markdown-simple native mac app that would spit out latex, etc etc. We ended up agreeing we'd probably spend more time on the app than actually writing - kudos on doing both.

I think you're overestimating how long it would take to get something usable put together, if you're only trying to make it usable by you. It took me about one hour to write the python scripts, and another hour to learn the appropriate LaTeX document class, and then I just opened up Aquamacs and started typing.

(A nice advantage of this is that I programmed it to tell me how far I've gotten on my daily word goals. I don't know any word processor that does exactly this, and it's really handy.)

Try Scrivener. http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

I hear that Scrivener is good, but I don't always use a mac, and I'm a starving college student. I like having something free that I can use over SSH in a pinch.

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