I'm trying to get get back to the one-week iterations/sprints for my personal projects. As one of my goals for the year, I want to write at least one short story or a chapter a month. “At least” being the goal since I want to write more, but writing Fedran is still a struggle because of burnout, entanglement, and just life.

Markdowny

So I dedicated this week to writing chapter thirteen of Nor Curse Be Found, but in the process of setting it up, I finally hit the point where bugs in Markdowny were too much for me. The main one is that I used the wrong shebang in the scripts but didn't realize it until I switched to NixOs. The key part is that I need to use /usr/bin/env bash for all my shebangs instead of assuming the path to bash.

# !/usr/bin/env bash

So that meant I needed to go into that project to fix it (and add a few features I've been wanting). But that was so old that I spent a few days bringing it up to fix my new project layout so I had a consistent environment. While doing that, I ended up on yet another tangent to create a script that could create my script files. (Not sure where to store that, to be honest.)

But then I finished the script to get the layout working to get Markdown working. After another day or so to coerce markdowny into Woodpecker CI, I was finally ready to actual write a feature I've been needing for a while.

New Feature

To submit entries to my writing group, I need to post a “events so far” document because it could be weeks or months between submissions. I use markdowny to do that with the list command:

$ markdowny list chapters/*.md | head -n 5
1. Always Moving: While Linsan waits for her mother to come home, she bounces around on the furniture and talks to her father. She announces that she has named a violin her father is making Palisis and learns that the violin is for her father's first wife who got married to her mother's best friend.

2. Early Lessons: Years later, Linsan is learning how to play the violin from her father. The lesson is interrupted when Dukan, her father's best friend and manager for the business, visits in a panic to tell him that the family's workshop in the valley is on fire.

3. Home Early: Unable to visit the burnt remains of the family's workshop, Linsan comes home to find her father work in depression. He had given up working on instruments and switched to writing articles about music. She goes into the attic to put some books away and finds Palisis in a corner, returned after Marin's death. She plays it, but then finds out that no one had ever played it before.

I needed a bit more details, so I decided to expand it to use Handlebars to give me a template for the chapters and to access all of the components inside the YAML header.

$ markdowny list ~/src/fedran/sources/allegro/chapters/*.md --template='- Chapter {{_number}} - {{{title}}} => {{{summary}}}' --trim-whitespace | head -n 5
- Chapter 1 - Always Moving => While Linsan waits for her mother to come home, she bounces around on the furniture and talks to her father. She announces that she has named a violin her father is making Palisis and learns that the violin is for her father's first wife who got married to her mother's best friend.
- Chapter 2 - Early Lessons => Years later, Linsan is learning how to play the violin from her father. The lesson is interrupted when Dukan, her father's best friend and manager for the business, visits in a panic to tell him that the family's workshop in the valley is on fire.
- Chapter 3 - Home Early => Unable to visit the burnt remains of the family's workshop, Linsan comes home to find her father work in depression. He had given up working on instruments and switched to writing articles about music. She goes into the attic to put some books away and finds Palisis in a corner, returned after Marin's death. She plays it, but then finds out that no one had ever played it before.
- Chapter 4 - Solace in Memories => As Linsan frequently did, she visited the family's ruins after school. The spot gave her peace despite everything they had lost. However, a bully from school, Dukan's daughter Brook, follows after her and they fight. During the brawl, they both manifest their powers: Linsan with music and Brook with concussion powers.
- Chapter 5 - Bitter Partings => Linsan comes limping home after her fight with Brook. Her parents are surprised she is there, but then Dukan and Brook show up. Dukan has his daughter apologizes and then offers to send money to the Sterlig's. Linsan's father tries to refuse it, but Dukan phrases it as helping Linsan and they accept.

It might not be much, but it was something I've been looking for. It also means that I can include things like POV, when it happened, or other details in the list to help work timelines, locations, and the like. Or use it as a simple index page generator for HTML and Gemini pages, if someone found a use for that.

Tables

Of course, there is also a table approach to the same thing:

markdowny table chapters/*.md --fields _basename title when.start locations.primary | head -n 5

Nor Curse Be Found

Despite all that, I got another chapter of Nor Curse Be Found written this afternoon. It isn't polished as I hope, I'm still struggling with the “feel” for the chapter and how the prince responds to things, but that is also something I have to finish to really understand and go back to edit.

Overall, it was a good day (it took me three days to write the chapter).