Another book, another routine. Another chain of illogic to boggle your average nypical. It goes a little something like this:
- Hand-writing things may be permanently portable, but transcribing it to legible text just slows me down because (a) I'm the only person who can read my handwriting (b) I can't afford to hire someone who can read my handwriting and (c) I end up reading what I've written more than typing in the thing.
- It really is quicker and easier for me to type directly into some editor. I have used several, but lots of people prefer documents in MSWord97 for some reason 9_9
- I perform all my work on a Mac. In order for my good self to translate something into MSWord97, I have to have a Windoze98 emulator, upload my book to it, make sure it's all working properly, and tweak that which needs to be tweaked.
- Beloved can do this way easier, they claim, but only if the document is in Markup. Or Markdown. I forget which, and it seems to be interchangeable.
- This has now lead to me writing everything new in something approaching Markdown, as I'm an old hat at ASCII coding and it seems the easiest possible thing I can do.
- I need to have some files as mobile documents, since I plan to travel and write a novel at the same time, I need a mobile Markdown editor.
- I had two good ones to pick from, on Beloved's recommendation: Minimalist Markdown Editor and Stackedit which uses the cloud in 0 easy steps.
- Since it was a massive pain in the arse to even try to install the MME, and another massive pain in the arse to transfer stuff to and from the cloud with any reliability, I am now writing my latest novel in Stackedit with the help of Google Docs.
- So now I'm back to writing things in ASCII code with only a very few modifiers. Amazing.
I consider myself somewhat experienced with cloud editing. I wrote KFZ on Novl'r, which was convenient at the time. Now something else is convenient... and I retain knowledge on how to use all of these. So that's something I guess.
Plus working with a Chromebook means I can fart around with my free-range fanfics if I so choose. Just a few of them, though. I know damn well that having twenty stories at once is a recipe for nothing going nowhere. Two or three is the ticket. Novel included.