How I write my steam punk novel #

tl;dr: I'm writing a steamp punk novel using git and asciidoc. You'll find a link to download the first two chapters somewhere in here

For the better part of a year I've been working on a steam punk novel called The Flight of the Auk. I was about eight chapters in when I saw an ad for Novel Beginnings, a contest for unpublished authors. The point of the contest was to submit the best beginning of a book. I've never been published, and I had started writing a book. How fitting.

For two months I set everything I could afford to set aside, aside and focused on polishing the first two chapters of my book. I must have rewritten those two chapters more than a dozen times. Carefully considering every paragraph. Every sentence. Every word. Routinly doubting if I had what it took, then force myself to continue anyway.

The day before the deadline I submitted my manuscript, and waited...

Two month's later I had my answer.

Out of 14 569 published works, 184 were put on a long list. I was not one of them.

It's hard to put into words how hollow I felt that day. I spent a long time perfecting those two chapters. I gave it all I had to give. All I got in return was "better luck next year".

I could've barely missed the list or placed last. I could've been disqualified. I don't know.

The reason for this blog post is not to collect sympathy, but to make sure that work counted for something.

The Flight of the Auk is about Alistor Burwick, the captain of the titular airship, and his attempt to stay clear of the Empire that hunts him. Things take a drastic turn for the worse when he accidentally takes on two fugitives. In their combined flight for freedom they uncover a secret so terrible that it threatens to unravel the very Empire that hunts them.

Sounds interesting? Then grab the first two chapters and let me know what you think!

Now, you might be wondering what tools I use to make my book?

Is it Scrivener? Atticus? No, it's much easier (and cheaper) than either of those.

The Tools of My (hopefully future) Trade #

I'm a software developer, so whatever I use, it better work well with Git.

Seriously, I've never had so much use for going back in time as when I'm writing a book. There are so many times that I change a paragraph "for the better", only to realize a few days later that I loved the original draft more.

I'm also at my happiest when I can use Helix, my text editor of choice. I spend most of my professional life in Helix, and that muscle memory is though to beat for anything text related.

The only natural choice then, is asciidoc.

Seriously, my book is just a bunch of adoc files tied together by a root-level index.adoc file.

Asciidoc is similar to markdown, but it's specifically made for longer documents, like books. It has official renderers for .html, .pdf and .epub3, which is really all you need.

Each chapter in my book is a .adoc file, and each sentence is a single line in that file. This makes diffs very easy to reason about.

For spellchecking and style improvements, I used to copy things over into ProWritingAid. I say "used to" since I don't currently have an active subscription (you might've noticed?). In any case, I welcome suggestions to improve my setup in this area.