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Show HN: Software Engineer to Novelist: Writing a Book Like Coding

frequal.com

22 pointsTeaVMFan11 comments

I just published my first book, Means and Motive. ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX )

As a software engineer, I approached writing like a software project. I used familiar tools (Emacs and HTML) for the primary writing.

I built my own tool (EPublish) to transform the HTML manuscript into an .epub file, the source for the ebook version. And I wrote shell scripts to reliably and repeatably transform the .epub version into PDF files for the printed editions.

I wrote 'design' and 'architecture' docs, describing the world, key actors, and timelines. I kept a task list of chapters and key scenes that needed to be written, in priority order. Along the way, I kept my files version-controlled so I could see the progress of the novel and edit mercilessly, without worrying about keeping old text around in backup files should I want it back for some reason.

If you've thought about writing a book, I highly recommend it. There are many similarities to the software engineering process. You'll also gain a newfound appreciation of the design, layout, and typesetting world, exactly how much work goes into each book you read.

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Congrats, the description sounds like a good mystery! It'd be interesting to read more about the tooling and process you used, even if you don't release everything open, maybe you could write/blog about it?

I was also looking if there was a Wikipedia page about Software Engineers/Programmers who were also fiction writers. I know Andy Weir from Martian was a programmer. I thought Neal Stephenson would have some background in programming, but looks like he never wrote software professionally.

I made a new post about EPublish itself here: https://frequal.com/epublish/

Nice post! Short and simple to read. Is epublish on GitHub or somewhere? It looks simpler than previous approaches I've seen.

I had the chance to help a bit with one of the AOSA books. It was a very powerful pipeline, but also quite complex to manage. IIRC it used pandoc (and a lot other tools).

So having a simpler alternative like epublish would be interesting if I have to work on another book in the future.

EDIT: sorry, just went to the main thread, and saw there you replied to another user it's not open source "yet" (hooray)

OP mentioned a tool called EPublish and I gather it's a home grown tool. It's ability to take annotations like TBH and generate a chapter-by-chapter report that marks those with TBHs is very cool.

If OP would consider open sourcing it I'd be interested in working with it.

Not open source yet, but I posted more information here: https://frequal.com/epublish/

Thanks for sharing more information.

Congratulations on your publication! Have you also tried integrating apps like obsidian, that help in sw development?

You're the second person to recommend Obsidian to me in a week, I'll take a look. For long-form writing, I'm very comfortable with my setup from article (html-helper-mode especially), but for notes I'll look at Obsidian.

Congrats, looks interesting, will check it out.

Thanks! It's available for Kindle Unlimited so if you subscribe to that, you can start reading right away, no checkout or payment required.

congratulations ,will checkout

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