I made a thingy!
Just to be a little different, here's a post that doesn't actually involve depression. I know, whoah, right? Anyhow.
So, I made a book! No, I didn't write a book (as that would require actual creativity, of which I have exactly none), but I did do all the work required to get rowyn's completed manuscript actually available -- all the typesetting work for the print edition, and all the little bits and pieces you need to do to get a book available on all the major ebook platform (Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo). I really enjoyed working on this with her, and having a project to work on really does good things for my mental health.
The book, by the way, is A Rational Arrangement, and is really quite good (and I'm not just saying that because I'm biased -- it's getting excellent reviews!). It's a fantasy polyamorous romance book, with a huge pile of worldbuilding and an absolutely delightful cast of characters. You should check it out! The print version, by the way, is very pretty. Yes, I'm biased. The ebook is pretty, too, of course.
*
And now, to geek out for a moment. So, something I did for this, which I thought was pretty cool, was I ended up with a build process for the book that was not dissimilar to a software build process.
I did the print layout first, using LaTeX -- a typesetting language that's been around since roughly the beginning of time, which can generate output that's second-to-none.
Then on top of that, I had another build step that postprocessed the LaTeX source to produce the epub that most of the ebook sites want. And then that got a post-processing step to turn it into a kindle book. You'd think that last bit would be simple, but it wasn't, because kindlegen is a massively buggy piece of crap that had me doing half its job for it, just so that it would stop dropping entire sections out of the final book. Sigh.
And then, on top of all that, I also postprocessed the LaTeX file into a series of 141 individual book sections, which are currently being posted three times a week at www.rationalarrangement.com. I wrote a few lines of code to automatically schedule those with Wordpress, so Rowyn doesn't have to do anything to post them -- it's almost entirely automatic! Wordpress is also set up to automatically crosspost and announce the new parts to her Livejournal account, to Tumblr, and to Twitter.
One really nice advantage of doing things this way is that nearly everything in all versions of the book is algorithmically generated, which means it's easy to change things. For example, each chapter in the book has a graphical header that looks something like this:
A lot of times, you'd create something like this with Photoshop or a similar tool, which is great, until you want to change it! And as it happened, Rowyn decided on the day she wanted to release the book that she wanted a different typeface for the chapter headings (I don't fault her for this -- it happens!).
I could have spent the morning in Photoshop going "load header, select type, change font, re-center, save file" 37 times, but instead I just had to change one line in a source file, type 'make', and I had a fresh set of output files with the new headers. It took me maybe three minutes to do. I was pretty happy about that.
Having the unified build system also makes it really easy to fix the occasional issues that crop up -- finding those last-minute typos, a character forgetting how many siblings they have, that kind of thing. Rather than have to fix it three or four different times, I just fix it once, and all is well.
Anyhow, I thought that was neat. Go buy the book if you want to check out all my hard work. :)
UPDATE: I had forgotten that I did a video of the build process in action. This is an earlier version (e.g. it doesn't generate the chapter headings), but it captures a lot of it:
So, I made a book! No, I didn't write a book (as that would require actual creativity, of which I have exactly none), but I did do all the work required to get rowyn's completed manuscript actually available -- all the typesetting work for the print edition, and all the little bits and pieces you need to do to get a book available on all the major ebook platform (Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo). I really enjoyed working on this with her, and having a project to work on really does good things for my mental health.
The book, by the way, is A Rational Arrangement, and is really quite good (and I'm not just saying that because I'm biased -- it's getting excellent reviews!). It's a fantasy polyamorous romance book, with a huge pile of worldbuilding and an absolutely delightful cast of characters. You should check it out! The print version, by the way, is very pretty. Yes, I'm biased. The ebook is pretty, too, of course.
*
And now, to geek out for a moment. So, something I did for this, which I thought was pretty cool, was I ended up with a build process for the book that was not dissimilar to a software build process.
I did the print layout first, using LaTeX -- a typesetting language that's been around since roughly the beginning of time, which can generate output that's second-to-none.
Then on top of that, I had another build step that postprocessed the LaTeX source to produce the epub that most of the ebook sites want. And then that got a post-processing step to turn it into a kindle book. You'd think that last bit would be simple, but it wasn't, because kindlegen is a massively buggy piece of crap that had me doing half its job for it, just so that it would stop dropping entire sections out of the final book. Sigh.
And then, on top of all that, I also postprocessed the LaTeX file into a series of 141 individual book sections, which are currently being posted three times a week at www.rationalarrangement.com. I wrote a few lines of code to automatically schedule those with Wordpress, so Rowyn doesn't have to do anything to post them -- it's almost entirely automatic! Wordpress is also set up to automatically crosspost and announce the new parts to her Livejournal account, to Tumblr, and to Twitter.
One really nice advantage of doing things this way is that nearly everything in all versions of the book is algorithmically generated, which means it's easy to change things. For example, each chapter in the book has a graphical header that looks something like this:
A lot of times, you'd create something like this with Photoshop or a similar tool, which is great, until you want to change it! And as it happened, Rowyn decided on the day she wanted to release the book that she wanted a different typeface for the chapter headings (I don't fault her for this -- it happens!).
I could have spent the morning in Photoshop going "load header, select type, change font, re-center, save file" 37 times, but instead I just had to change one line in a source file, type 'make', and I had a fresh set of output files with the new headers. It took me maybe three minutes to do. I was pretty happy about that.
Having the unified build system also makes it really easy to fix the occasional issues that crop up -- finding those last-minute typos, a character forgetting how many siblings they have, that kind of thing. Rather than have to fix it three or four different times, I just fix it once, and all is well.
Anyhow, I thought that was neat. Go buy the book if you want to check out all my hard work. :)
UPDATE: I had forgotten that I did a video of the build process in action. This is an earlier version (e.g. it doesn't generate the chapter headings), but it captures a lot of it:
Click to view