2026-09-06T17:41:56Z https://d.moonfire.us/tags/mfgames-writing-make/ D. Moonfire Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International 2014-03-10T05:00:00Z https://d.moonfire.us/blog/2014/03/10/a-lot-of-little-things-going-on/ <p>I think if I had to come up with a word to describe the last week, I'd go with "scattered." I still have too many projects open at the moment, but I'm limping along because of other obligations.</p> <h2>Writing</h2> <ul> <li>I need to process the edits for <a href="http://d.moonfire.us/blog/tag/sand-and-blood/">Sand and Blood</a>. They are reasonably extensive, but the "Track Changes" caused Libreoffice to choke. That means I have to switch over to Windows and Microsoft Word to integrate them, which makes it just that much harder.</li> <li>I'm mostly done with <a href="http://d.moonfire.us/blog/tag/sand-and-love/">Sand and Ash</a> except for a short stack of feedback from the writing group. Once I get through those, I'm going to let it marinate for a little bit before finding/reusing an editor.</li> <li>Because the writing group didn't have enough submissions, I (foolishly) started working on <a href="http://d.moonfire.us/tag/sand-and-bone/">Sand and Bone</a>, the third and final book of the series.</li> <li>I also submitted a short story for an anthology I was asked for. That will show up this Thursday, which gives me a day to integrate feedback and get it in before the deadline.</li> <li>I still have a commission that I keep not finding the time to do. I did tell the commissioner that I was going to be overloaded for a few more weeks, so this isn't critical. I just don't like procrastination.</li> <li>I'm still trying to get the swearing and insult stuff done, but I got distracted by reformatting my conlang's dictionary into YAML.</li> </ul> <h2>Support</h2> <p>Outside of writing, I had a little bit of IT support at home. SMWM's laptop stopped booting on Tuesday. After messing around for an hour or so, it looks like she trashed her hard drive again. I was bemoaning the lack of SSD of an appropriate size when a coworker said that there were 750 GB SSDs on sale. So, I snatched up a 750 and a 250 (for myself since my computer was also locking up) and installed them on Friday. Unfortunately, I forgot to check my hard drive size so I ended up going from a 320 to a 250. Which is fine, I had too much crud on my computer.</p> <h2>Development</h2> <p>Somehow, in the middle of reinstalling my entire laptop, I also did a little bit of work with <a href="https://github.com/dmoonfire/docbook2odf/tree/drem-2.1.0">docbook2odf</a> 2.1.0 and <a href="https://github.com/dmoonfire/mfgames-writing-make/">mfgames-writing-make</a>. It now generates an error-free Smashwords documents and fixes most of the outstanding issues. That means that I don't have to do any manual editing on the resulting document before uploading to Smashwords.</p> <p>This means that in a single command (make all), I generate the print-ready PDF in A5, the Kindle MOBI, the Smashwords Microsoft Word document, and an epubcheck-verified EPUB. And the PDF handles proper hyphenation for my conlang, drop capitals and epigraphs, and even building the "also by" section.</p> <p>The system is still badly organic, but it "works for me." Eventually, I'll get it cleaned up, but I have so many other things, I'm limping along with this system until I can do something else. But, still nice to be able to have everything in 10 seconds and know there won't be any errors (in the technical side).</p>