Some Book Tech

Recently. Recently, in the last 48 hours, I figured out a few things that I would need to do at some point while my book is taking shape. Those few things were:

• Put artwork on my cover in the PDF.
• Merge the cover and title page PDF to my main pages PDF.
• Add bookmarks to my PDF.

So I found an online service called PDFescape that's free and lets me upload my cover PDF and then upload a PNG which I can then drag over the cover page in the PDF and then save it as a new PDF. So that makes the cover of the book for the moment.

And I found a Python script that merges PDF files into one PDF. This saved my life because my book may end up being over 100 pages. Most free online PDF services will not work on documents over 100 pages. The Python script needed a library to run. Two seconds later, I was running the Python script to merge the two PDF files together. That's how cool Python is. It's the number one computer programming language right now as I type for a reason.

I also found a SourceForge app called jpdfbookmarks. It's old. It needs Java 1.6.0 to run. I have Java 1.8. But what the heck? I went and installed the old Java. Then I installed the bookmark program from 2008. It ran. It was glorious. It allowed me to open the merged PDF book I have written so far, and add bookmarks to its blank slate. So now my book will have bookmarks in it. I threw some money at the bookmark guy's PayPal account to thank him for the app of the year (at least in my case).

To many, this is nothing new. But this is my first time ever writing any kind of book that isn't a user guide or operations manual. I'm doing everything from scratch and by hand almost with this project. Nothing is automatic it seems.

The Start of Chapter 1 of My Book

I'm working on Chapter 1 of my book. Currently, it's still titled How to Roleplay the HARD Way. For now, the name is sticking to the book cover. But we'll see.

Got this first page written up. So many distractions while I type because of YouTube response videos I do. I have next week off. Hopefully, I won't be doing videos all that time instead of writing my thoughts to Scrivener.

Anyway. Here is page 1. Technically, it's 2. I've been writing this book in reverse order, by the way. It reminds me of how I've made movies.

My brother gave me some editing suggestions. I then fixed the grammar at the top and removed the italics from the dialog.

I'll be editing any similar pages I have written.

A Sample from My Book

My goal of writing 660 words a day has not happened. I've written zero words for a couple days of last week. Those days were spent trying to tweak the most utility I could get from Scrivener. There were some issues I ran into that Scrivener is not programmed for.

The forum members said that I need to use "such and such" program to accomplish my page formatting goals. All I want is for the first page to not have a page number on it. There are hundreds of YouTube videos showing how to remove numbers from the first page of any Word document. But none for Scrivener.

Now that I know such things are not possible, I can focus on writing my book instead of fussing further with the trial & error interface Scrivener uses. I wish Scrivener's YouTube videos took customers like me beyond just tutorial hell. You have to already know what you are looking for to understand what the videos and instruction manual are talking about.

Anyway, I have the pages looking the way I want them, and compiling my draft into a PDF is a snap. I just need to remember what I did in the settings for things to look right is all. Here is a sample of pages from Chapter 3.

Writing My First Fiction Book

I thought I would blog about the beginning of the writing of my first book. I know this is supposed to be a blog about fiction writing, if or when I ever do start my fiction writing. Anyway, it has begun. As it turns out though, my first book will actually be a work of non-fiction.

No, I'm not going to create a new blog site for non-fiction. I'll remain here with this project. The reason being, that this non-fiction book that I'm writing is technically about fiction. My book is about role-playing in role-playing games. Since role-playing games are about fiction most, if not all, of the time, I'll be writing about how to do fiction in such games.

The working title for the book now is How to Role-Play the HARD Way. I very recently fired up Scrivener to re-learn how to use it after forgetting all of it from not using it for a year? It look a couple days to get myself organized with it again and to decide the page layout to use for it, etc. Here is a rough table of the contents so far:

The introduction for the book is written. Finished that part a couple days ago. I wrote this outline last night. My goal is to write a chapter a day. We'll see how that goes as my work schedule is random, and I may or may not be tired when things should be typing away at a regular pace.

If anything interesting comes up while writing this book, I'll blog about it here.