Another lovely weekend. Mostly it involved dealing with the various annoyances of feline and canine compaions and taking care of a rather nausous woman. We recently changed the arrangement of our furniture and closed off some of the cat’s favorite hiding spaces, so it is taking a bit for everyone to adjust. But, I’m pretty proud of what I can do with 2×6’s, 2×4’s, and lag bolts.

I finished the final draft for Victim of Love for the writer’s group on Thursday. And managed to knock off about a thousand words from the length. This will be the first story of mine they have ever seen, so it is a form of first impression. I can only hope that it won’t come out as total crap or something they’ll whisper behind my back on.

I also wrote a pair of small programs that convert my text-based format into something more structured or useful. One called creole2docbook which converts my Creole-based format into DocBook. The only difference is that I have section-level attributes for author’s, keywords, and the like. I also allow sections without titles, which I used for breaks in my documents.

And then a shell script (docbook2pdf) to change that DocBook into XSL:FO and then into PDF. I’d use the nromal docbook2pdf on my computer, but it can’t handle DocBook 5.0 which is much easier for me to work with. And purely XML instead of SGML-based. I need to make this script. While most of the world^* seems to prefer Times New Roman, I honestly love the look of Courier. Actually, any monospace, typewriter-like font. So, I write in Courier and create PDF’s in Courier, but the example FO stylesheet I’m using does Times New Roman. One of my changes is to make it output Courier and maybe double-spaced.

* From reading around, it looks like a good number of editors/agents prefer Times, so I need to add that to my reformatting guidelines when I submit stories/novel hooks. Some also commented they just switch to Times when they get RTF documents, but I’m trying to make their jobs easier.

I’m planning on writing a docbook2dokuwiki to convert my stories into something I can use directly in my websites. That way, I can make a script that will format all my public stories (in a file already) and upload them to the site, complete with taxonomy (via the keywords) and categories (via the directory structure).

Beyond that, we had a lovely dinner with a coworker and his wife. I ripped a few more DVD’s for the MythTV system, splurged on a few new DVD’s from Walmart (including all 4 Tremors movies). Worked out; which seriously kicked my ass this time. I am still sore from that. And refinanced my car.

This week, just moving forward on plans for the pregancy. Getting repairs on the Illinois house, moving money around to pay for medical bills. For writing goals, working on the commission and hopefully My Father’s Bike.