Wow, I’ve had a very interesting day yesterday. It mostly involved me sitting on the bed (my current favorite writing spot) and working on the second round edits for my commission. I got it down and sent out, which is always a rush because I just absolutely love writing “END” at the bottom and meaning it.

I also worked on getting MG ready for eBooks. Yes, it is at the end of its effective life of being a niche novel with a small reader base, but print on demand (POD) gives me the chance to keep it out there, long after it is no longer commercially viable. Plus, I get the chance of learning how to do typesetting and enjoying all those little technical details about creating books I don’t exactly get as a writer.

I hate when books disappear. I’ve been trying to get copies of some of my favorite novels for years but for some reason don’t want to spend $80 for a banged up copy. I’d rather give the original author a few more dollars for the work they put into it. Traditional publishing might not allow that, except for the evergreens and classics. So, I went with POD for MG (and now eBooks). Someone might want it in a few years, so might as well keep it out there. Creating an eBook is something I’m willing to do, because it doesn’t take that much effort once you have the original manuscript.

Me keeping MG alive is much like my reviews. I write the reviews that I want to get. I keep MG up because I would love it if other publishing companies would do the same. No, it won’t make them do it, but if I’m not willing to do it myself, how could I ask anyone else to? I already know I’d pay for a POD book that I remember from my past, or one that simply doesn’t show up on the shelf anymore. Same with eBooks. Doesn’t mean you have to advertise them to avoid diluting the new novels, but I’d still like it to be out there.

But, time to work on the new again. I owe Noble Pen chapter three by tonight, so between doing cleaning, accounting, taxes, and ripping DVD’s, I need to clean up chapters one through three and get it posted.

The rest of this is about the technical side of my writing.

It did also point out some flaws in the tool chain I’m building up for writing. Most of my commissions end up using Gentium for the “final” release. I already know that most people don’t like Courier New as a font so I have my public font. I usually send out my commissions as PDF’s so I like to use that font. (Side note, my first novel is typeset in Gentium also.) So, I had to modify my docbook2pdf to let me change styles on the fly. While I was at it, I also added the ability to remove table of contents; I use section breaks pretty heavily and I couldn’t find a good way of doing it in DocBook, so I basically use a title-less section tag for it. It works out pretty well, except for the cruft in the TOC. So, one little flag, “–notoc” and magic doesn’t happen.

I’m also working on getting MG ready to be an ePub file for Lulu. I’m using the same system as Flight of the Scions and the same tools. Though, MG has chapter illustrations in it so I wanted to put them in. It took me a little bit to get my creole2docbook program to parse it as a proper DocBook image, but once I got it, the converter to ePub (creatively enough, docbook2epub) sticks them in.

I got another little rush to see the illustrations on my Nokia n810 reading my own little eBook. Strangely, it took me more effort to get my name in the ePub format. Apparently, while the following seems to work-

<author>Dylan R. E. Moonfire</author>

-what I should have done was this:

<author>
  <surname>Moonfire</surname>
  <firstname>Dylan R. E.</firstname>
</author>

The first works for HTML and PDF’s, but the bottom works for everything. Just a note for those trying to get names using the docbook-xsl-ns stylesheets and DocBook 5.

I also figured out how to get tags into the books. These are basically categories. I haven’t found the One True Taxonomy™ for these, so I threw in a random one that sounded right and I’ll add others as I get better at this. The taxonomy goes into the <info> section:

<subjectset>
  <subject>
    <subjectterm>Fantasy</subjectterm>
    <subjectterm>Steampunk</subjectterm>
    <subjectterm>Coming of Age</subjectterm>
  </subject>
</subjectset>

I’m also not using the standard docbook2* programs I found on Linux. Most of them are geared toward DocBook 4 or less. A bunch of them use LaTeX, which I like, but I like the XSL:FO approach to creating PDF’s much better. Plus, DocBook 5 is a really nice implementation of XML instead of SGML. I like it better, but I needed to create my own tools to do what I wanted. And that is almost as fun as the writing process itself.