Category: blog

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

I spent the first part of the week learning about how to make eBooks. But for writing, this was a week of poor concentration. I wasn’t able to focus on much of anything. It wasn’t writer’s block. It was more of a feeling that I just didn’t have anything worth writing inside me. Instead I spent time on Twitter. Overall, a poor showing.

I stopped at the penthouse window to watch the lava. It came down the mountain like God pouring molasses from the sky. A fast moving flow had erased the road. It had been there when I started up the stairs. The hotel was cut off from the highway. I stuffed a watch into my front pocket. “Time to roll,” I said to the empty room.

The lava came with the dawn. The tourists and businessmen left with the first alarm. They flooded the street in pajamas and robes. Without time to pack, the riches of a small city were left laying for someone to pick up. Today, that someone was me.

Ebook publishing seems to be my theme of the week. It’s something I didn’t know much about. I’ve managed to learn quite a bit this week. The most important thing I learned is about workflow.

There are lots of ways to make an ePub file. Amazon KDP will take just about any file and convert it to their .mobi format. Smashwords has a converter (“Meatgrinder”)that take a Word (.doc) file and do the conversion to ePub. These are convenient because they’re an all-in-one solution. But for the most part require a lot of work on the input file to avoid the garbage—in-garbage-out problem.

This is what seems to be the second in a series about making ePub format eBooks with Ulysess III. Yesterday, I compared a few options for making eBooks. I found the least troublesome way was to just simply export from Ulysses using a custom stylesheet. Today’s post is about how to fix an annoying export bug.

Any Ulysses user knows there’s an ePub export function. It’s right there in the export sheet. Sitting there, throwing shade with it’s little slanted “e.” Mocking me.

This afternoon I was thinking about turning my sample chapter into a eBook. There’s lots of ways to build an eBook. The most common seem to be:

Writing a sample chapter for a possible programming book was quite eye-opening. I’ve never done any serious non-fiction writing other than a magazine article. Writing a programming book is considered non-fiction just as a humor book is.

I find the classification funny. “Fiction” is defined as everything not-made-up. It can be anything from a story about a crime in your town to space battles. Non-fiction is everything else.

In the sample chapter I realized there was as much fiction as truth. I was making up a story about the code I was writing. I could take the story in direction and provide the code to go along with it. I’m not trying to solve an “out in the world” problem. I’m just telling a story, illustrated with code. If someone learns from it, even better.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

The sample chapter upped the numbers quite a bit. I also slacked off on blogging because of it. I happy to see the WPH going up.

(This is a sample chapter I put together to see how I felt about writing a programming book.)

Before starting to build a more complicated program, let’s start with something simple. We’re going to hack together a short script that works. It will upload a single cat picture to a S3 bucket. We’ll learn the basics of both a ruby script and how cloud storage works.

#supernovaSaturday