So starting in August of 2003, as followers of these diaries might recall, I wrote a blog in character. It went on fairly intensively for a couple years, ultimately ending the initial chapter about 5 years, in June 2008.

It occurred to me after writing 3 or 4 NaNos and getting them printed for my own use, and for pass-around copies for friends to read, that the diary might be fun to have, actually printed, on the shelf. So I reformatted it using Scrivener, which is nothing short of a wonderful writers' word processing and manuscript management system; it also lets you put in research materials; it's all right there. I've used it for several Nanos as well, and two point seven revisions of the latest one.

Anyway, what do to for cover art. Fortunately, toxicfur solved this problem for me, presenting as partial fulfillment of my birthday swag, cover pictures for two volumes: the diaries, and a future revision of the latest novel.

Which leaves me doing that one last proofread. Which is mostly for formatting issues. I'm using Scrivener to keep track of a manuscript in multi-markdown format (it's a very simple markup language that can be translated into html, latex, rtf, and several other formats). Thence to LaTeX and so to a pdf file for upload to lulu.com. Along the way, if memory serves, some formatting of, oh, say, poetry or whatever, got lost, and I seem to recall last winter in the previous "nearly final" draft having to fix the latex version. Uh, what I did to it, I have no idea.

But it's fun, re-reading stuff I wrote in 2004, the words and the character (or is it a side persona? I no longer know) who won for me the attention of toxicfur. And it's also profoundly odd, re-reading this novel sized (c. 172,000 words) narrative, written a page or two at a shot, for five years.

Anyway. Nearly done now. I'm sure there are plot flaws (to the extent that there's a plot at all), but it was fun, and I learned a lot about telling a story.