I’ve signed up for the CRWR243 Writing Drama course up at the College this term. It needs just a couple more students to register by Friday or it’ll be cancelled. Why not take the opportunity to learn to write a play? Maybe even that movie script you’ve been thinking about all these years. You know the one: where the aliens raise the dead to warn us that humanity is on the verge of creating a weapon that will explode the universe?

Oh wait, that movie’s already been made.

In any case, the course is every Wednesday evening from 7 to 10pm. We’re even all going out to see a play at the Guild in a couple of weeks.

The instructor is Patti Flather, and if you have questions, contact her at gwaandakfoo@quuxklondiker.com.

Hope to see you next Wednesday.

I was working on a business proposal today. The sort of work that inspires within a terrible craving for distraction.

“Aha,” I said, startling the dog. “I’ll design a new format for my business documents. One that emphasizes my comfort with machines rather than humans. One that confidently shatters the conventions of polite society. And, of course, one that can be generated automagically from plain text.”

I succeeded…to the extent that my proposal work was postponed.

A business document that figuratively screams "I do not care to do business in the accepted fashion." When sent electronically, a literal scream is attached in MP3 format.

The sample text is courtesy of the “Far Far Away” option of blindtextgenerator.com.

Between business reports, class notes, and the creative writing course I’m hacking my way through at the College, I reckon that I churn out a few thousand words a week.

As someone who teaches the finer points of Microsoft Word, you’d think it would be my writing tool of choice. Trouble is, Word doesn’t meet my very specific anally-retentive writing requirements commandments:

1. Must run on Linux.
2. Must produce version-controllable content.
3. Must have basic word processing functionality.
4. Must cheque speling.
5. Must permit simple, consistent formatting.
6. Must not fight me with every goddamn keypress.

Commandment #6 definitely rules out Word and its %#$@*! auto-numbering. Linux-friendly OpenOffice Writer stumbles on #2, and, sadly, a little on #6. Plain text editors don’t do well with #3 through #5. So what’s left?

It has taken me years to answer that question. During that time I have tested an assortment of text-based markup languages without success: HTML, variations on XML, and even L^AT_EX.

Trouble is, <chapter xml:id="Excerpt"><title>Excerpt</title><para>\begin{document}it\textquoterights <em>hard</em> to read marked-up text, even after you\textquoterightve just written it.\end{document}</para>

Maybe not that hard to read, since you wouldn’t combine all three markup syntaxes together.

What the markup languages have going for them is superb support for commandment #2: I can keep a complete history of each change made to a document, and compare any two versions — without Word’s %#$@*! change tracking getting all up in my bidniz. I desperately need this for my class notes, so that I can keep many years of updates together and view, for example, the gradual disappearance of the Floppy Disc from my lectures. Good riddance.

There are a few “light” markup languages, and my favourite has long been Markdown. It uses the sort of text-based formatting you might type yourself in an e-mail: “underline” a title with dashes, use asterisks to whip up a list, or bracket a word with _underscores_ for emphasis. It even handles hyperlinks and images. Markdown also comes with a handy script to generate HTML code from the text. A couple of years ago I wrote about the opposite exercise: converting existing HTML into Markdown.

But Markdown proved a little too simple for many of my most common writing tasks. It doesn’t support tables or cross-references, for example. I also hadn’t found a good editor for writing Markdown that didn’t violate at least one of the commandments (usually the dreaded #6). It also didn’t have an easy way to generate PDF output that could be customized with my own formatting.

Then, out of the blue, I came across three tools a couple of months ago that addressed my long-standing predicament:

• MultiMarkdown, which adds tables, and xrefs, and whatnot without muddying the syntax;
• FocusWriter, a distraction-free word processor that doesn’t try to format plain text, as described last month; and
• wkhtmltopdf, a tool for converting HTML to PDF, preserving all CSS formatting along the way.

All I needed was some way to glue all that together, so I wrote a little script to do just that, and a little bit more. Most days, it works like a charm.

For example, I can write some simple, yet enthralling, Markdown text:

A Fateful Trip
==============

It all started at a tropic port, aboard a tiny ship:

* the **mate**, a mighty sailing man; and
* the **skipper**, brave and sure.

A Three Hour Tour
-----------------

Five passengers set sail that day:

| The Millionaire | His Wife | The Movie Star | The Rest                               |
| --------------- | -------- | -------------- | -------------------------------------- |
| Thurston Howell | Lovey    | Ginger         | Mary Ann and, believe it or not, "Roy" |

Were it not for the fearless crew's courage, the _Minnow_ would have most assuredly been lost.

Fortunately, the ship was able to set aground on an uncharted desert island, with wardrobe and radio intact.

In FocusWriter, the text is — thank the gods — unaltered:

It ain't real writin' unless there be a shaded rocky outcrop in the background.

Then I run my little script and, depending on the style I choose, it produces both HTML and PDF output in mere milliseconds, ready for public display.

The default style is admittedly uninspired:

But I can just as easily substitute the style I created for my class notes:

Or, if I’m feeling Mickey Spillane-esqe, I can turn on the manuscript style and relive the glory days of clickety-clack-ding:

If you’ve gotten this far without questioning my sanity, I salute you. Nevertheless, a stable writing system is important in my varied lines of work, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the one I’ve concocted.

I just discovered FocusWriter, a free writer’s word processor that runs on most any operating system. I’m going to give it a try because the glitzy window chrome that ornaments most word processing tools is too distracting. Here’s a snapshot of my entire screen when it’s running:

The perfect soothing backdrop for the Great Canadian Bile-Oozing German-Speaking Made-of-Expired-Chicken-Liver Robotic Alien Novel.

The backdrop is courtesy of National Geographic, which offers terrific wallpaper photographs for your desktop.

I spotted this on the Rebecca Writes blog and pasted in one of my previous posts:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

That’s quite a compliment, although it appears that it uses a simple reading level algorithm for matches. David and I both tend toward long words and long sentences.

Try it out yourself: iwl.me

I’m guessing that a lot of us blog just because we like to write. Some of us have to write. Either way, we each expect that our writing skills improve with regular practise.

Though at some point our skills reach a plateau and advance no further without the guidance of a coach, a mentor, or in the case of writers, an editor. As Yukon Jen recently said of editors, “Find a good one. Work with them. You will become a better writer.”

Sadly, I can’t afford an editor. Sadder still, I funded my beer fridge as an editor of academic papers in my university days. I mercilessly hacked away at run-on sentences, weak-kneed arguments, uncited assertions, and the mystifying allure of the word “thus.” One of my clients made it into Osgoode Law on the strength of his essays, so I figure I once knew something of the art.

Even for a former amateur editor, self-editing is difficult. After searching for the perfect turn of phrase for half-an-hour, how many of us are willing to strike it from the screen for the trifling reason that it doesn’t add any meaning to the text? A wasted thirty minutes is damned meaningful to the writer, far less so to the editor, and not a bit to the reader.

I reckon the next best thing is to acknowledge my own writing mistakes, especially the mistakes that I make over and over again, despite knowing that they’re mistakes. Those are the ones my inner editor must attack first. Looking through the past few years of blog posts, I’ve collected the following reasons why I’m not a better writer.

Sesquipedalian Grandiloquence

Translation: using big words just to sound impressive.

This has to be my worst writing sin. The odd thing is that the biggest words appear in my first draft. If I keep working at it, the words eventually shrink.

But I’m not yet prepared to stipulate browser fungibility.

All nodes link to Chrome.

However, in the ongoing matter of Want v. Need, the two parties will stipulate the following: what we don’t want, and what we certainly don’t need, are any more vapid mouth-breathers clogging our sidewalks and stairways while thumbing obliviously on their hand-held “smart” devices.

Forget the iWhatever, what I really need is a device that I’ll use less.

What exactly is the attraction of the word “stipulate”?

Here’s a doozy from a technical article I wrote years ago.

You will understand the negative implications of dual interfaces much more clearly at the precise moment that you attempt to return a reference to an object’s non-default interface when calling from a late-bound client across apartment boundaries.

Tame Visual Basic with IDL

Put. Down. The. Thesaurus.

A Little Allotment of Alliteration is Actually A Lot

Number two on the hit list has to be sequences of words that sound alike.

Were I from the East, yesterday would’ve been my Oriental-Oriented Orienteering Orientation …but I’m not, and unfortunately, “Occidental-oriented” is an ornamented accident.

Raptor Ravages Radio Reception — Reminiscent of Rodent-wreaked Resistor Ruin

How is any of that necessary?

Maybe it’s Possible that There Are Some Less Than Completely Assertive Statements

I must eliminate “I think”, “it seems”, and “likely” from my vocabulary. Out timid statements! Begone!

Cromulent Cultural References

I tend to slip in obscure references to pop culture far too often. For example, here’s a reference to the Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk episode of The Simpsons:

Of course, Chrome is not all smiles und sunshine.

All nodes link to Chrome.

You’d have to undertake many years of Simpsons-study to spot that one.

Inconsistents Verb Tensed

This is something I do all the time, but I can’t find any examples of it because I’m completely blind to inconsistent verb tenses: past, present, and future all combined in the same paragraph. I’ve probably made the same mistake in this very paragraph.

I did!

Inventobobulous Wordnikerry

Here’s a good one. I invented at least one word and used another that belongs to, and should be left in, the nineteenth century:

So, when faced with five-hundred pages of verbiose flapdoodle, I look for any procrastiphilic diversion at my disposal.

A spoon full of programming makes the medicine go down.

I wonder if I misspelled “verbose” or instead invented a concatenation of “verbose” and “grandiose.”

Just how far can you take this sort of thing?

Duplicloreproittosynchroordinopysimilefuseplication

Answer: too far.

And Starting Sentences with Conjunctions

At some point in grade school, we learn the rule that you mustn’t start a sentence with “but” or “and.” Later on, we learn that the rule can occasionally be broken for effect. The key word is “occasionally,” as I seem to do it all the time.

Freewheeling, yet Rule-bound: Punctuation!

I checked the database. Fully 101 of my 180 blog postings contain semicolons, and 103 include dashes.

I think my over-use of punctuation stems from my computer programmer training, a discipline that scatters punctuation marks like droplets in a hurricane.

Emotional Cowardice

I thought about leaving this section out, but that would’ve just made the point all the more emphatically. Despite having written much about myself on this blog, little of it reveals my inner thoughts and feelings. Heck, I used a five-word bullet point to announce my wedding, and that was a couple of weeks after the fact. You can’t be a good writer unless you’re willing to write honestly about your experiences and emotions.

* * *

So there we have it. A starting point on the path to better writing. Now that I’ve recognized many of my faults, I have hope that I can correct them. That last one will be the most difficult to conquer.

And don’t succumb to the urge to point out the many errors that I’ve made in this posting. I’m not a better writer yet.

The little bit of non-technical writing that I do tends to be inspired by random odd phrases that strike me as amusing. “Municipal assassin” is one such phrase that still tickles.

I fleshed it out into a very short, non-traditional, “postcard” story for a creative writing course I took last year.

And with that, I present: Malcolm Stigwell, Municipal Assassin.

This week I celebrate my eighth full year in the territory. Eight is not a terribly round number, but if humans had evolved without thumbs it would’ve been: fractional arithmetic on computers would be a little less surprising, prices would all end in 7, and Rudy Giuliani would be the Mayor of 11/13.

To mark the occasion, I’ve posted the e-mail dispatches I sent along the road that took me here in a new section of the site called What He Wrote. I took the long way, coming north from Toronto via Halifax. Coincidentally, it took me eight weeks to make the trip, and upon arriving, my car had eight tires. Spooky.

You’d have to be a real What He Said fan (Hi Mom!) to slog through all of it, but at least it’s now preserved for posterity. Yes, this rickety old Celeron server should outlive me and my descendants.

I hope to continue adding to the What He Wrote section; perhaps including some of my works that contain the more traditional narrative elements like a beginning and an end.