2005-11-28 15:04
It’s been a very productive writing month for me on the NaNoWriMo front and I’m on schedule to pass 50,000 words on Wednesday right on schedule. I’m still pretty happy with my story overall, although there are myriad things to go back and clean up, revise and edit now that I have a much clearer idea of where the characters and plot are going. When I get to 50,000 words I will have really just finished part one of the two parts that will ultimately make up what I think the final novel should end up being.
I’m really happy that I ended up using Bazaar-NG and plain text to write my novel the whole way through. It’s going to make revising it and editing it so much nicer down the road. Eventually, when the story is in a little bit more finished form I plan to start formatting it using LaTeX to get it into PDF format for eventual self publication at lulu.com.
On a LaTeX related note, I took a math class back in college that introduced it for the purpose of writing papers, but I hadn’t really paid attention to it for the last 10 years. LaTeX still works pretty much the way that I remembered it, but there have been a few significant changes and improvements in the the intervening decade. For one thing it’s now totally easy to install and run under MacOS X. There are also an amazing amount of add on modules that make it a lot easier to lay out documents in just about any form imaginable (the memoir document class looks outstanding for book creation). Perhaps most importantly, exporting to pdf from LaTeX is totally painless and pretty much the defacto standard for final document distribution now rather than the more crufty dvi to postscript dance we had to go through 10 years ago.