Tech Tuesday: Roll Your Own Writing System, part 6: Jekyll

The series rolls to an end…

In Part 1, we had a look at Markdown and the five or six formatting symbols that cover 97% of written fiction. Part 2 showed how you can use Markdown without leaving the comfort of Scrivener. Part 3 began exploring eBook publishing using files generated from both Scrivener and directly from MultiMarkdown. Part 4 provided a brief overview to a different tool called Pandoc that can convert your output to a wider variety of formats, and is one way to create print documents for beta readers or even production. Part 5 described how to use MultiMarkdown’s transclusion feature to include boilerplate information in an output-agnostic way, and how to use metadata variables to automatically set up front matter.

Scrivener is an excellent writing tool, and we have seen how using it with MultiMarkdown only makes it better. But there are conditions where abandoning the GUI for a completely text-based writing system just makes sense. For example, you might want to go to a minimalist, distraction-free environment. You may want to move to a completely open-source environment. Or you might need to collaborate with someone else on a project, and Scrivener really isn’t made for that.

Don’t Hyde from Jekyll

Jekyll is the most popular static site generator. You write in Markdown—Jekyll’s particular flavor, which is similar to MultiMarkdown in many ways—and if Jekyll is running, it automatically converts your pages to HTML as soon as you save. It even includes a built-in web server so you can see what the changes look like.

If you’re on a Mac, installation is almost too easy. Drop to a command line, enter gem install jekyll bundler, and watch a lot of weird stuff scroll by. It’s as easy on Linux, if you have Ruby 2.0 or newer installed. On the Microsoft thing, there are some specific instructions to follow (I installed it on my work PC, no problem).

Once it’s installed, get going by following the quick-start instructions.

Organizing

Unlike Scrivener, organizing your project is on you. But there are a couple things that might help:

Each story or project should live in its own folder. Within that folder, tag each chapter or scene with a number to put everything in its proper sequence. For example:

100_chapter_1.md
110_arrival.md
120_something_happens.md
200_chapter_2.md
210_more_stuff_happens.md

It’s a good idea to increment by 10 as you create new scenes, in case you need to insert a scene between two existing ones later. To move a scene, change its number. If you have more than nine chapters, use four-digit numbers for the sequence. (If you need five-digit numbers, you should seriously consider turning that epic into a series of novels.)

Differences from MultiMarkdown

Like MultiMarkdown, Jekyll’s flavor of Markdown supports variables and transclusion. But there are a couple differences. In Jekyll, variables look like MultiMarkdown’s transclusion:

{{ page.title }}

You can draw variables from the page’s metadata, or from the _config.yml configuration file (in which case you replace page with site).

Transclusion is a function of the Liquid templating language, built into Jekyll. To include a file:

{% include.relative file.md %}

You can also use include instead of include.relative to pull files from the _includes directory. By using Liquid, you can specify parameters to do different things, effectively creating your own extensions.

For example, here’s how you might do section breaks:

<p class="sectionbrk">
  {% if include.space %}&nbsp;{% else %}&bull; &bull; &bull;{% endif %}
</p>

So if you just enter {% include secbrk.html %}, you get three bullets. To get a blank line, enter {% include secbrk.html space="true" %} instead.

Also like MultiMarkdown, Jekyll supports a metadata block at the beginning of a file. While they look very similar, Jekyll uses YAML format for its metadata. The upshot is, a Jekyll file begins and ends its metadata with a line of three or more dashes, like this:

---
title: The Sordid Tale of Woe
author: Henrietta Jekyll
permalink: /sordid/sordid_tale.html
---

Certain metadata tags are special to Jekyll. For example, permalink specifies the name and location of the HTML file Jekyll creates from the Markdown source. Another important tag, layout, can be used to choose a template. You can set the default layout in the configuration file, then use a second configuration file to override it for doing things like publishing.

Git Out

Jekyll is also a blogging tool. Your posts go into a special directory, _posts, and have a specific naming convention. Two additional metadata tags are important:

date:   2017-03-21 07:00:00 -0500
categories: writing technology

The date entry specifies the date and time your post goes live on the generated site. The categories entry lets you tag each post for easier searches.

But all that’s just pixels on the screen unless you have a place to put your site. That’s where Github Pages comes in. You can upload your Jekyll files to Github Pages, and it automatically updates your site when it finds new or changed content. This is pretty useful, but it’s even more useful when you’re working with other people. Everyone has their own copy of the source files on their own computers, and they can each push (update) their changes as needed.

Now What?

I hope I’ve given you some ideas for new ways of looking at your writing, and how to make the publishing part more efficient and more collaborative.

The rest… is up to you. I’d love to see your own ideas in the comments.

The Brass Mechanism, episode 3

Part 1 | Part 2

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Liana set their prize on the table, and they stepped back to take a look. It was a strange-looking device, but even folk with a basic education could see it was some kind of machine. All brass gears, spindles, and fittings it was, with a few flecks of the wood that had once covered it still clinging to the supports. It sported a crank on the right side, the wooden handgrip long gone. A row of numbers dominated the front of the device: 104 072 298. Below was a smaller set of numbers: 98 1812. It had a faint odor of oil and decay.

“So what do those mean?” Chakan asked, pointing at the numbers.

“Maybe the answer is in here.” Liana opened the book, watching to see if the pages would crumble at a touch. “Have a care with this, but it might survive our perusals.” She turned up the title page; it felt brittle but did not fall to pieces. “Using the Prediction Calculator,” she read. “What in the Fourth Hell?”

“This hunk of metal tells the future?” Chakan gave the device an incredulous look. “Ha, the Queen would want to get her hands on this, then.”

“This text is hard to make out. They must not have written the same way we do. ‘Accurate predictions… to ensure, against the stars shall you calibrate.’ What?”

“Sounds like Low Speech. Outside of Phylok you get, so the farmers talk.”

Liana took a moment to parse her husband’s explanation. “Ah. So the ancients all talked the same way? I see. This is saying you calibrate this thing against the stars to get accurate predictions.”

“It uses the stars to make predictions? Outlandish. Shipmasters use the stars to tell where they are on the sea, but I’ve never heard of anyone using them to predict the future.”

“Eh. I never heard Low Speech until you used it just now.”

“If the ancients used the stars to predict the future,” Chakan mused, “the sages would find this thing useful indeed.”

“Ah!” Liana cursed as the page tore. “Bring some paper, love. If these gods-forsaken pages come apart on us, we can preserve what they say for the sages.”

“The sages won’t be pleased with our destroying the originals. But if we’re going to puzzle this thing out, it’s the best we can do.” He paused. “Liana… perhaps we should give this over. Let the sages ruin the book. Knowin’ the future could be a fearful business.”

“Could be some profit in it, love. Besides, we found it. We pulled it out of our field. You got the box open. We’ll do the best we can, and that will have to be good enough. Here, write down the numbers it’s showing. Maybe we can puzzle out their meaning later.”

“Aye. Then we’ll sow tomorrow?”

“If the Creator brings us another day of dry weather, indeed. Don’t you have those numbers written down yet?”

“I’m sketching the whole works.” Chakan slid the paper to his wife.

“How do you do that so well, and so quickly?” she asked. In less time than it takes to drink a cup of tea, Chakan had sketched a fair likeness of the mechanism, with Liana looking on. He had drawn a look of wisdom and revealed knowledge on her face.

“A knack. I don’t get to exercise it often.”

“I like this. We should put it in a frame. Then we’ll wait for dark, and calibrate this… this thing. But let’s copy the instructions while we’re waiting.”

“If we don’t destroy the pages along the way.”

“Hoy, I got an idea.” Liana took another sheet of paper and slid it in between the next two pages in the book. “Maybe this will help.” She gently turned the page. “Ha, it worked! Now here’s what it says…”


The night was clear enough to see the stars, and they followed the instructions to calibrate the device. They twisted knobs and pointers on the top of the mechanism as directed, then held their breath as Chakan turned the crank counter-clockwise. One turn, two turns… then the odd clicking noises inside the mechanism ceased and the crank spun freely as the instructions said it would.

They took their prize back inside and looked it over. “Hoy,” said Chakan, “the numbers along the bottom are different, now. Now it’s 84 4269.”

“Eh. I think it’s forty-two something by the old Camac calendar,” Liana mused. “And it’s pretty close to the eighty-fourth day of the year. Maybe that’s today’s date.”

“Then this thing has been in the ground a long time, waitin’ for us to dig it up.” Chakan looked at his sketch. Eighteen-twelve. Gods… that mighta been the year of The Madness.”

“Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Liana… let’s give this over to the sages. We’re messin’ with somethin’ that got buried at the worst time ever. Or just before. What was that first set of numbers? One oh-four?” Chakan consulted his transcripts. “First and third groups use the same numbers. An ill wind blows strong. Makes me wonder what the rest of it means.”

“It won’t bring back The Madness, love. That was a good twenty-four centuries ago. We’ve reset it for modern times, and we’ll make some use of it. Then we’ll give it over. Fair enough?”

continued…

Kneecapped 2017, an update

Tonya, Queen of Kneecaps
image source: about.com

When we last left this, the knee had started improving around the time I went to the doc. The day after, the pain decided a brief vacation was all it needed… then the left knee decided to join the fun.

Reality the Crutch has been missing for some time now, but we have a metal adjustable cane laying around, so I adopted it instead to get around. Things were still pretty painful last Tuesday, when I went to the orthopedist. He looked at the X-rays and decided we needed an MRI. I asked him for some happy pills, and he wrote a prescription for hydrocodone+acetaminophen right away. I’d been popping ibuprofen like candy for a while, and it was keeping things manageable through the day, so I figured I could continue that and save the happy pills for night time (the pharmacist said that was OK).

So for the next few night, it was two happy pills before bedtime, wait an hour for them to kick in, sleep like a log until they wore off around 4am, then one more to get me through the rest of the night. Not the best sleep I ever had, but better than what I’d been getting.

After a few days of improved sleep and lots of inactivity, both knees started getting better. From experience, I know this is the dangerous phase of a knee problem—it’s way too easy, now that you can get around without tons of pain, to overdo it and go right back to where you started. So I rested as much as possible, moved when I had to. Icing started doing what it should, so I went back to doing it, alternating knees as needed.

The MRI was on Monday, and was anti-climatic. Laid on a pallet, knees propped up, moved as little as possible while this big round thing spent 20 or 30 minutes making weird noises. Today was the interpretation. Long story short, he wants to do a full replacement. There’s a lot of crud in there, and roto-rooting it won’t take care of it. Due to long-scheduled travel, this isn't going to happen until May, but in two months I will post Tonya for the last time.

Tech Tuesday: Roll Your Own Writing System, part 5: Reuse

The series rolls on…

In Part 1, we had a look at Markdown and the five or six formatting symbols that cover 97% of written fiction. Part 2, showed how you can use Markdown without leaving the comfort of Scrivener. Part 3 began exploring eBook publishing using files generated from both Scrivener and directly from MultiMarkdown. Part 4 provided a brief overview to a different tool called Pandoc that can convert your output to a wider variety of formats, and is one way to create print documents for beta readers or even production.

Way back in Part 2, we used Scrivener to embed HTML separators between scenes and for internal scene breaks. As we saw last week, that doesn’t work when you need to output to a different format. As it turns out, there’s a way to work around that by using MultiMarkdown’s transclusion mechanism. Transclusion and metadata variables provide the capability for reuse, pulling common boilerplate files from a library.

Inclusion… Transclusion?

Transclusion is a technical term, but it’s easy enough to explain. You use it to embed another Markdown file into your document, like you might include a graphics file. A function like this is essential when you’re maintaining a collection of technical documents, because you can reuse common sections or passages—write them once, store them in a library of common files, and then changing one of the source documents automatically updates all the documents that use it. For fiction writing, it’s a good way to pull in all those boilerplate files (about the author, front matter, etc.) that you need for each book.

To transclude a boilerplate file, put this on its own line:

{{myfile.md}}

When you run multimarkdown, it pulls in the contents of myfile.md and processes it.

Now here’s where it gets fun. Say you really need to be able to output to both HTML and OpenOffice. Instead of embedding HTML that gets ignored in the OpenOffice conversion, or vice versa, you can use a wildcard:

{{myfile.*}}

Now, when you output to HTML, multimarkdown transcludes the file myfile.html. When you want OpenOffice, it uses myfile.fodt. You just have to supply the files with the right extensions and content, and you’re off to the races! You can use this in the Separators in Scrivener to choose the right markup for your output.

A few caveats for fodt transclusion: You cannot use entities like • or ὚ to specify special characters. You have to enter them as characters. If you only have one line to add, you don’t need to put any OpenOffice markup in the fodt file—plain text is fine, but use the right extension so multimarkdown knows which file to use.

If you want to reuse transcluded files with other documents, you can add another line to the metadata:

Transclude Base: /path/to/your/files

You can use a relative path like ../boilerplate, but it’s safer to specify the entire path in case you move the file to some other location.

Does the Front Matter?

But transcluding boilerplate files is only the beginning. Especially for front matter, you need to change at least the title for each book. Fortunately, MultiMarkdown has that covered.

In Scrivener’s Compile window, the last entry is Meta-Data. Back in Part 3, you used this to specify a CSS file for HTML output. Scrivener pre-fills entries for the Title and Author, but you can add anything else you want here. All the metadata ends up at the beginning of the file, where MultiMarkdown can process it further.

So you might have a block that looks like this:

Title: Beyond All Recognition
Subtitle: The Foobar Chronicles, Book 1
Author: Marcus Downs
Copyright: 2017
Publisher: High Press UR

Create a title page that looks like this (for HTML output):

<div style="text-align:center" markdown="1">
**[%title]**

**[%subtitle]**

by  
[%author]

Copyright [%copyright] [%author]. All rights reserved.

Published by [%publisher]
</div>

![](logo.png)

{{TOC}}

Instant front matter! The {{TOC}} construct inserts a table of contents, another Multimarkdown feature.

Now What?

Now you know how to include boilerplate files in your book, and how to automatically put the right text in each output format.

Next week… it’s something completely different to wrap up the series.

The Brass Mechanism, episode 2

Part 1

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

“It’s as tight as I can make it,” said Chakan, clambering out of the hole.

“Maybe it’ll work this time, then.” Liana tugged the ox’s harness. “Pull, ya great thudding beast!”

Chakan admired his wife as she coaxed the ox to keep pulling. She even knows the right language, he thought. The animal strained against its harness, and… “Hoy, it’s coming up!”

“Keep it coming!” Liana told the ox.

“Stay on that side,” Chakan warned. “If the rope snaps…”

“Yar. Easy… easy… ha!” The block surrendered its grip on the surrounding earth and slid up the slope and into the field. “That’s it! Drag it back to the barn!”

At the barn, they returned the ox to its stall with a bag of feed, then looked over their prize. “Eh,” Liana mused, “it might make four or five pavers. Enough for our needs, anyway.”

“Aye. But… look.” Chakan knelt and ran his finger across one side. “Looks like a line here.” He brushed away dirt. “I think it runs all the way around the thing. Like it’s a lid.”

“Ha! Maybe it is a chest full of octagons, then?”

“Could be.” Chakan tugged at the “lid,” but it did not budge. “Probably sealed. Here’s where the plow hit it.” He rubbed at a scuff mark along one side. “Hate to take a hammer to it, we might could use it for something.”

“Here, let me bring the pry tool.” Liana kissed her husband. “Keep looking it over, love. You might find something.”

“Best bring a knife, too,” Chakan called after her. “I doubt I could slip that pry tool into this tiny crack.”

“Hoy, I got an idea. Wait here.”

A few minutes later, Liana had driven an old knife blade all the way around the thin crack, and pounded others into each corner. “Yar,” she said, sitting on the ground opposite from Chakan. “Now, twist your blades on your side, and I’ll twist mine. If we get it right, we might get this thing to slide up. Ready? Now.”

“Hoy, the blades are loose,” said Chakan, after a minute of twisting and pulling. “Aye, we got it up a little.”

“Yar. I think we can get the pry tools in there now.”

The afternoon rolled by, and still they strived to open their prize. At last, they worked the lid a finger’s width up, and yet it would not lift off.

“Is it my imagination,” Liana mused, “or is the lid pulling itself back down? Have you ever seen such a thing?”

“Enough,” Chakan growled, standing over the block and working his fingers into the gap on either side. “This ends now.”

“Don’t hurt your back,” Liana warned.

“Eh, I’m more worried about my hands here.” Chakan gripped the block with his boots, pushing with his legs and pulling with his hands. “Get loose, ya Goblin-spawn!” He strained, his accent and curses growing thicker. “Ah, that’s it… come off!” At last, the lid gave way with a pop and a tearing noise, neither of which had they expected to hear from a stone box. Chakan dropped the lid in the soft dirt and panted for breath.

“What in the Seventeen Hells is this?” Liana wondered, looking into the box.

“Eh. Shoulda just handed it over and let the sages do the hard work,” Chakan grumbled, thinking about the Rules of Finding, part of the agreement they signed in exchange for the land grant: Stonework, you may do with what you will. Money is yours but for the normal tax. Items of interest should be turned over to the sages, that they may be studied and benefit the entire nation. “That’s an item of interest if I ever saw one.”

“Yar. We’ll turn it over. But the Rules don’t say we have to turn it over right away. Let’s take a look at it ourselves, first. We did the hard work of getting the box out of the ground and getting it open, so we’ve earned that much.” Liana looked at the box. “Clever folk. Whoever boxed this thing up meant it to survive the ages.” She pointed at a layer of black gunk around the top edge, then turned the lid over. “They painted pitch on the inside of the box and lid, see? It sealed the box tight. That’s why it was so hard to open. I wonder how old this thing is.”

“Well, everything in the ground out here has to be from Camac That Was, nay?”

“Yar.” Liana reached into the box and lifted the contents out. Some kind of mechanism, it seemed; the tarnished brass struggled to reflect the light. “Welcome back to the sun. Now what are you?” She looked down. “Chakan, there’s a book in there. Maybe it’ll tell us what this thing is.”

“If we can make heads or tails of it.” Chakan picked up the book, wincing at the twinge in his back. “I just hope this was worth the effort.”

continued…

Tech Tuesday: Roll Your Own Writing System, part 4: MultiMarkdown and Pandoc

The series rolls on…

In Part 1, we had a look at Markdown and the five or six formatting symbols that cover 97% of written fiction. Part 2, showed how you can use Markdown without leaving the comfort of Scrivener. Part 3 began exploring eBook publishing using files generated from both Scrivener and directly from MultiMarkdown.

Today, we’re going to take a brief look at a different tool you can use to publish MultiMarkdown files.

Pandoc describes itself as a Swiss Army knife for markup languages, but it goes farther than that. More than markup languages, it converts to and from common word processor formats and can even convert directly to EPUB. You can mess with templates to get the output really close to production-ready, but that's a little beyond the scope of our series here. In real terms, it’s not any faster than loading a prepared HTML file into a skeleton EPUB; both methods need a little cleanup afterwards.

This sounds at first like it’s just an alternative to using MultiMarkdown, but it goes a little farther than that. One problem with embedding HTML in your Markdown files, none of it gets converted to other formats. So you can’t just take your MultiMarkdown file and create an OpenOffice file by running:

multimarkdown --to=odf story.md >story.fodt

Because all your section breaks disappear. Pandoc ignores embedded HTML as well… so again, what does Pandoc buy you?

Well, once you have your HTML file, you can use Pandoc to convert that HTML file to the word processor format of your choice.

pandoc -f html -t odt -o story.odt story.html

And there’s the answer to how you make your story available for beta readers who want a word processor file. If you’re willing to tolerate some sloppy typesetting, you could use it for your print document as well. Pandoc also supports docx and rtf as output formats.

Now What?

Now you can output your MultiMarkdown file in a number of formats, including eBook (direct and indirect) and common word processor formats.

Next week, we’ll look at some special features of MultiMarkdown that you might find useful.

Comments? Questions? Floor’s open!

The Brass Mechanism, episode 1

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The thought crossed Chakan’s mind: Plowing’s a man’s work.

The better part of himself spoke up immediately. You know better, ya lout. Reacher women plow when they have to. Two years you’ve been a Matriarchy man now, you shouldn’t think like that anymore.

He looked across the field, where his wife Liana plowed with the other ox. And she’s plenty able to do it, a third part of him thought, with mixed admiration and desire. Chakan had always found sturdy women more attractive than either the willowy Reacher standard, or the round soft kind favored in Westmarch and the Alliance cities. They would be married a year, come the autumn equinox, and Chakan often thought how lucky he was, to—

The plow lurched, nearly jerking out of Chakan’s hands. His surprised “Hoy!” did not cover the scraping of the plow blade dragging across a rock. “Hold up, ya lump!” he yelled at the ox.

“What happened?” Liana called from her side of the field. They had each taken half to plow, and now they were close together. Closer than Chakan had thought; they were nearly finished.

“We found another paver, like as not.”

“That’s good. We need a few more to finish the walkway.”

“Maybe that’s why the Crown granted us this patch,” said Chakan. “We’ll never find the end of clearing it.”

“Every time I think about it, I marvel at how vast Old Stolevan must have been. You can hear legends of Camac and Stolevan carrying a million folk each until your ears fall off, but to think this was part of the city…” Liana trailed off, looking toward Queensport, visible to the southeast. “Its boundaries stretched clear out to here and beyond. Well, mark the spot and we’ll dig it up after lunch.” She gave him a wicked grin. “But not right after lunch, mind you.”


“How much longer?” Chakan asked, somewhat later, lying in bed with his wife. This was their favorite dessert after any meal.

“Oh, the Healer said not to worry about it right away. I’m not even showing yet.” Liana had kindled two months ago, to their mutual delight. “If all goes well, we might not have to stop.”

“That’s good to know.” He rolled onto his side, draping an arm across his wife.

“Will you love a daughter as much as a son?” she asked.

“Of course. She won’t be the only one we have.”

Liana stroked his hip, then slid her fingers down. “Good. Hoy… I think you’re ready for more.”

It was mid-afternoon before they pushed themselves grumbling out of bed. But Liana was right; they needed a few more pavers. They had dug up many cut stones last fall and laid them between their house and the barn—a tiny barn by the standards Chakan had grown up with, big enough to house their oxen and what little hay they needed for a southern winter. They were plowing two months before farmers would in the Northern Reach, and needed far less hay to keep their livestock fed through the winter. Still, what they called “winter” along the southern coast was wet, and the paving stones helped them stay out of the mud.

They took shovels, a pick, and rope from the barn, then trudged across the field toward the stick that Chakan had used to mark the spot.

“Maybe this one will be a chest full of octagons,” Liana quipped, getting to work.

“Aye. And maybe we’ll get a winter without snow,” Chakan laughed, digging next to her.

“Snow?”

“Oh, aye. A Reacher saying. The land up there is still covered with it, and here we are getting ready to plant.”

“No, love.” Liana tossed another shovel of dirt aside. “What is snow?”

“You don’t—of course you don’t know about snow, if ya grew up in Queensport. Well…” Chakan stopped to think. “It’s like rain, but it’s frozen before it falls from the sky. Instead of drops, it comes down in tiny little flakes. Enough to bury the land, sometimes as high as me.”

“Ah, I’ve seen that a time or two. Enough to cover the ground, sometimes, but…” Liana grounded the shovel. “Tell me true, Chakan. Is that a tall tale you tell about it covering the land?”

“Tell ya true, Liana. The ground around the warm springs stays clear, but everywhere else? Snow as far as ya can see.”

“No wonder you moved south,” she grinned.

“Nay, nay. I moved here…” he stopped, realizing she was teasing him. But the warmer climate was the least of his reasons to leave his old home for this strange nation where women ruled. As a younger son, he had little to inherit. In his youth, he learned he was not cut out for the military. The one girl he fancied took up with a boy with better prospects. He hired himself out as a roustabout, a freelance farm hand, and found he liked the work. But that desire for one’s own land, one’s own place, was in the Northerner blood. The Matriarchy’s embassy promised land to those who would emigrate and embrace their customs…

“Hoy, ya lazy lout, stop woolgathering!” Liana laughed. “I think I just hit it.”

“Eh? Sorry.” Chakan put his back into it, and soon they looked at the corner of a stone.

“That might be enough to finish the walkway,” Liana mused. “Depends on how deep it goes.”

“Only one way to find out,” Chakan grinned, and began digging around it.

A few minutes later, they stopped. “Eh,” Liana grumbled. “Looks like a block. ‘Twould make a fine cornerstone for a tavern, but it ain’t much good for us.”

“We could always hire a stonecutter to split it,” Chakan pointed out. “That’s enough stone to finish the walkway, and give us a good start on a walk to the road.”

“If she don’t shatter the thing. No telling how long that block has been buried. Well, fetch an ox, husband. We’ll get this out of the field, then we’ll decide what to do with it.”

continued…

Kneecapped, 2017 edition

Tonya, Queen of Kneecaps
image source: about.com

Last Wednesday, the knee started twinging. I didn’t give it much thought, because it does that once or twice a year. I baby it a few days, it gets better. This time, it waited until Monday to kick it up a… dozen notches or more. It hasn’t hurt this bad since before the surgery, and that was before Mason was born.

The normal RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) routine hasn’t seemed to help—in fact, icing it seems to only make it worse, and it can only stand being in a knee brace for an hour or so. Sleeping has been a chore all week, because I can’t find a comfortable position. One of the recliners almost works, and I got a relatively decent amount of sleep last night, but I’m having to watch myself to not get cranky with the kids or the wife. I’ve had to work at home all week, and the wife has done her usual “leave Charlie with me while I’m supposed to be working and go take care of everyone else” routine.

When it had not improved by Tuesday, I got a doctor’s appointment. It started feeling a little better by the time I arrived, of course. They sent me out for X-rays anyway, and I got the results yesterday: arthritis and bone spurs.

Next step is the orthopedist who roto-rooted this knee almost eight years ago. That visit’s scheduled for Tuesday, and I wonder how it’s going to turn out. Maybe scraping the thing every seven or eight years will keep it mostly functional. I’m not sure how I feel about a replacement just yet.

But I’ll keep you posted.

Pilgrims Charlie's Progress

I won’t sit here forever!

While the evaluations show significant development issues, most related to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Charlie is making progress. In the last week, he’s finally started sitting himself up, and he’s almost crawling. The report from the psychs lays it out—he’s about six months behind, and they want to confirm he doesn’t have cerebral palsy.

“He’ll have issues with this pretty much his whole life,” they said. I asked if Charlie would be able to become a functioning adult. “It’s too early to tell at this point.” While I won’t, I SO want to punch Badger Boobs for what she did to him. At least she’s been fixed, so she can’t do that to another baby.

Charlie, on the other hand, is a very happy little rugrat. His appetite came roaring back a couple days ago, after the congestion (probably associated with teething) went away. He’s up to ten teeth now, and continues to want to let you feel them. Especially the sharp ends.

He gave me a little scare the other morning. He woke up, chattering contentedly in the crib, about the same time I was getting up. I walked by on the way to the coffee pot, and he had rolled against the end of the crib, legs in the air and playing with the bars. When I came back, he had gotten into his knees and was looking over the side rail with his hands dangling over. Suddenly, the coffee had to be put down while I grabbed the kid. It’s high time to lower the crib mattress, as much as we like the height for diaper changes.

The Pack&Play that used to be his bed is now his playpen. He’ll spend a lot of time in it, until he wears himself out; then he lays down and cries until someone rescues him. Sit him next to Mason, and his mood goes Instant Sunshine, though. I swear, I’ve never known anyone who loves someone the way Charlie loves Mason.

The stationary “roundabout” (it’s like a walker with a base instead of wheels) is also a common play area for him, but for some reason… put him in it, wait 15 minutes, Atomic Diaper. Every time.

Chewed right through the story

His favorite thing these days (besides people) is paper. I keep a sheaf of an old manuscript next to my keyboard, and he likes to pull a sheet (or a bunch of sheets), wave them around, crumple them, maybe chew on them, then drop them on the floor and get another handful. If my books ever become some cult classics for the ages, historians are going to wail and gnash their teeth at what Charlie did to some of that early work, nyuk nyuk.

Ah, if Charlie could talk, what would he say? “Play with me, Mason!” or “Feed me!” would be the top two.

Tech Tuesday: Roll Your Own Writing System, part 3: Publishing MultiMarkdown

The series rolls on…

In Part 1, we had a look at Markdown and the five or six formatting symbols that cover 97% of written fiction. Last week, we saw how you can use Markdown without leaving the comfort of Scrivener.

This week, it's time to build an eBook using MultiMarkdown output. If you have been cleaning up Scrivener’s EPUB output in Sigil, you should find the process familiar—only, without most of the cleanup part.

First thing, output an HTML file through MultiMarkdown. In Scrivener, click the Compile button and select MultiMarkdown→Web Page in the dropdown at the bottom of the screen.

Under the Overhead

Open Sigil, then import your HTML into a new eBook—or better yet, a “skeleton” eBook with all the boilerplate files already in place.

All you have to do now is to break the file into separate chapters and generate a table of contents. You can save even more time by creating a custom text and folder separator in the last part of Scrivener’s Compile Separators pane:

<hr class="sigil_split_marker"/>

Then, when you’ve imported your HTML file, just press F6 and Sigil breaks up the file for you. If you start with a skeleton EPUB file, you can have a perfectly-formatted EPUB in a matter of minutes. Seeing as it takes me an entire evening to clean spurious classes out of Scrivener’s direct EPUB output, this is a gigantic step forward.

One thing to watch out for: MultiMarkdown inserts a tag, <meta charset="utf-8"/>, at the beginning of the HTML output. EPUB validators choke on this, insisting on an older version of this definition, but all you have to do is remove the line before you split the file.

Breaking Free

Perhaps you want to slip the surly bonds of Scrivener. Maybe your computer died, and your temporary replacement does not have Scrivener—but you saved a Markdown version of the latest in your Dropbox, and your beta readers are waiting.

Scrivener has its own copy bundled inside the app, so you’ll need to download MultiMarkdown yourself. It runs from the command line, which is not as scary as it sounds. In fact, Markdown and MultiMarkdown are very well-suited to a distraction-free writing environment.

After you’ve installed MultiMarkdown, start a Terminal (or Command Line on that Microsoft thing). On OSX, press Cmd-Space to bring up Spotlight. Type term, and that should be enough for Spotlight to complete Terminal. If you prefer, you can start it directly from /Applications/Utilities.

Next, move to the right directory. For example, if your file is in Dropbox/fiction, type cd Dropbox/fiction (remember to reverse the slash on the Microsoft thing).

Here we go…

multimarkdown mybook.md >mybook.html

Now you have an HTML file that you can import into Sigil (just don’t forget to remove that pesky meta tag).

Silly CSS Tricks

Last week, I mentioned a couple of things you can do with CSS to help things along.

First, when you Compile your Scrivener project to MultiMarkdown, click Meta-Data in the options list. You should see some pre-filled options: Title, Author, and Base Header Level. Click the + above the Compile button to add a new entry. Call the entry CSS then click in the text box below and enter ../Styles/styles.css—if you’re using Sigil, it puts all stylesheets in the Styles directory. You can give it another name if you have a stylesheet pre-defined (mine is called novel.css).

Pre-define your CSS

Now open your stylesheet, or create one if you need to. Add the following entries:

p.sectionbrk {
    text-indent:0; text-align:center;
    margin-top:0.2em; margin-bottom:0.2em
}
.sectionbrk + p { text-indent: 0; }
h1 + p { text-indent: 0; }

The first entry formats the sectionbrk class to be centered, with some extra space above and below. The second one is more interesting: it cancels the text indent for the paragraph after a section break. The third entry does the same thing for a paragraph following a chapter heading (you can do this for h2 if needed as well). This is the proper typographical way to format paragraphs following headings or breaks, and you don’t have to go look for each one and do it yourself. I told you this can save a ton of time!

Again… Now What?

Now you can work with MultiMarkdown within Scrivener. You can export it, generate an eBook, and work with the file outside of Scrivener.

Next week, I’ll show you another way to make an eBook from your MultiMarkdown file.

Comments? Questions? Floor’s open!

Tech Tuesday: Roll Your Own Writing System, Part 2: Markdown in Scrivener

Last week, I showed you a brief introduction to Markdown. I only hinted at why you might want to use Markdown instead of comfortable old bold/italic (and other decorations). I’ll get detailed next week, but here’s a hint: you can save yourself an entire evening of work getting your eBook prepared for publication.

This week, though, we’re going to look at how Scrivener and Markdown work together. TL;DR: Very well, actually.

Scrivener supports a Markdown extension called MultiMarkdown. You don’t have to worry about the extensions, unless you’re writing more technical fiction with tables and the like. For fiction, what I showed you last week should cover all but decorative stuff.

Make a copy of your WIP. Got it open? Original one is closed? Okay, let’s get started.

In Scrivener, click the Scrivenings icon in the toolbar, then click the Draft or Manuscript icon in your Binder (whichever one your story is in). You should now see your entire story laid out in Scrivener.

Click anywhere in the story text, then go to Format menu→Convert→Bold and Italics to MultiMarkdown Syntax. If you use anything other than bold/italic in your writing—like typewriter font for text messages, or blockquotes for letters—you’ll have to go through your manuscript and mark those yourself. This is that other 10% I mentioned last week.

Stylin’

Scrivener has formatting presets, since it only remembers the formatting and not the preset name after you apply it. Not as good as styles, but they work for our purposes.

Markdown uses backticks (a/k/a accent grave) to define typewriter font: `this is a text message`. You can either insert your backticks by hand, or let Scrivener insert them when you publish. I have a preset called Typewriter for this, but we can define a new preset or redefine an existing one. Here’s how it works: any string of text marked “Preserve Formatting” (Format menu→Formatting→Preserve Formatting) gets the backtick treatment at Compile time.

So go find a text message or other small string of typewriter text in your manuscript, and select it. Apply Preserve Formatting as described above, and the text gets highlighted in cyan or light blue.

Now, go Format menu→Formatting and:

• for a new preset: New Preset from Selection
• to redefine a preset: Redefine Preset from Selection→(preset name)

For a new preset, enter the name in the dialog box. In both cases, select Save Character Attributes in the dropdown to create a text (as opposed to a paragraph) preset. Now, any time you mark a selection of text as Typewriter (or TextMsg, or whatever you called it), you’ll see it highlighted and in your designated typewriter font.

Looks good, gets converted to backticks. What’s not to like?

To make a block quote, put a > at the beginning of each paragraph in the block, and in any blank lines in between. Add a blank line to the end of the blockquote so the next paragraph doesn’t get picked up as well. Scrivener assumes that preserved-format paragraphs are code blocks, and displayed as-is, so you can’t use its Block Quote preset this way unless you turn off Preserve Formatting. In either case, you’ll have to add the > character.

Okay, ship it!

Not quite. There are still a few things you need to set up before you can get to the Efficiency Nirvana that Scrivener and MultiMarkdown offer.

To see where we need to go, let’s have a look at the output. In Scrivener, click Compile, then go to the Compile For: dropdown at the bottom of the compile window and select MultiMarkdown. You could also try MultiMarkdown→Web Page. Don’t forget to check which directory it’s going in, so you’ll be able to find it. Open it an a text editor (Text Edit, Notepad, whatever you like).

You should now see a few lines at the top with the story and author name, followed by the rest of the story. If you don’t use blank lines between paragraphs, your paragraphs run together in one big blob. There may not be any chapter titles, and likely no section breaks beyond blank lines. So let’s start fixing things. You’ll only have to do these once, or (at worst) once for each project.

Close the file, go back to Compile, and click Separators in the list. For Text Separator, click Custom and then enter the following:

<p class="sectionbrk">&bull; &bull; &bull;</p>

This tells Scrivener to put three bullets between each scene. (Anything Markdown or MultiMarkdown can’t do directly, you can do with HTML.) You’ll want to create or edit a CSS file to format the sectionbrk class the way you want (most people want it centered with a little space above and below). We’ll go over how to automatically link the CSS file to your HTML in a later post.

Set the other parts to Single Return. That’s all you have to do for Separators. In the other options:

• Formatting: Check Title for Level 1 (and lower levels, if needed) folders.
• Transformations: Check:
• Straighten Quotes
• Convert em-dashes
• Convert ellipses
• Convert multiple spaces
• Convert to plain text: Paragraph Spacing
• Replacements:
• Replace (Option-Return twice); With (Option-Return)<p class="sectionbrk">&nbsp;</p>(Option-Return twice)

The Transformations section sounds a little scary, but MultiMarkdown re-converts those text entries to their nice typographical equivalents. I suggest you do it this way for more consistent results. The Replacements entry just inserts a blank section break that won’t get deleted during a conversion. You could just insert a non-breaking space, but (again) a later blog post will show you how you can use this to eliminate formatting issues.

Converting paragraph spacing to plain text replaces a paragraph break with two paragraphs, inserting a blank line between paragraphs as Markdown expects. It works if your Body paragraph format puts space at the beginning or end of the paragraph. If you use indents instead, try “Paragraph Spacing and Indents” and hope the indents are deep enough for Scrivener to catch.

If that doesn’t work, add two more entries to Replacements:

• Replace (Option-Return); With (Option-Return twice)
• Replace (Option-Return four times); With (Option-Return twice)

The two replacements are needed because of a bug in Scrivener. It converts one return to four instead of two, but the second time through fixes it.

Now hit Compile, then open the generated file in a text editor. You should see a plain text file, with a blank line between each paragraph and Markdown syntax for various highlighting. You can go back into Scrivener and try MultiMarkdown→Web Page to see what that looks like, too.

Now What?

Now that you can export a clean MultiMarkdown file from Scrivener, you can work with it in any text editor. Sometimes, just looking at the same text in a different way is enough to get you moving on a WIP and get it done. If you have an iPad, you can still edit your Markdown-ified project using Scrivener on iOS, or you can use an iOS Markdown editor like Byword to edit your Markdown file (and import it back into your Scrivener project later).

But that’s only scratching the surface. Next week, we’ll start looking at ways to prep your MultiMarkdown file for beta or final publishing.

Comments? Questions? Floor’s open!

In-Tents Weekend #2

What’s more fun than a campout?

Camping out near the beach, of course!

The second of two camping trips offered to Mason’s Cub Scout pack this month was on Tybee Island. I’ve always wanted to go there ever since I heard about it back before I got married; as for Mason, he was entranced by the idea of camping out completely surrounded by water.

Backpack on wheels. There’s more room behind
the seats than you might think.

Having made notes about what we needed most on the last trip, I was able to do more with even less this time. It helped that I found my old backpacking stove, which is far more compact than what everyone else had, and a few other things. Seeing as Tybee is a nearly 6-hour drive from FAR Manor, I took Friday off work for the drive down (Mason’s school was out), and figured we had to leave by 11am to have enough light to set up camp. We got moving at 11:05, which goes to show that the fewer people you have involved in a trip, the less late you’ll be.

Last time I had gone to Savannah was when Daughter Dearest was in high school, going to either All-State Choir or GMEA. One thing I’d forgotten from those days: I’m sure Cat Stevens got the idea for his song Miles from Nowhere while traveling on I–16. What a boring drive that is. Fortunately, I’d brought a couple of frapps along, and I consumed them both. Mason used one of the empties when he went from “don’t need to go” to “freaking out” in 10 minutes. I swear, that kid’s bladder is the size of a walnut.

Warmth

But we got to the campsite in good order, and got the tent set up before it got dark. Some of the other families came down on Thursday, and did set up in the dark. Mason immediately took to haring around with the other scouts while the adults got supper together and went over some of the things planned for the weekend. I also kept a close eye on the weather forecast; there had been a 30% chance of rain for Saturday predicted earlier in the week, which dropped to 20% then came back up to 30%. Mason went full-tilt until about 10pm, at which point I told him to curl up in the sleeping bag with the iPad for an hour. I cut him off at 11… he said, “I’m not gonna go to sleep,” and was snoring five minutes later.

Now let me tell you about the campsite. It’s a pretty big RV park, and was far busier than I’d expected for mid-February. The tent area abuts the local cop shop—and the rear entrance is actually inside the campsite. That meant we were treated to diesel motors and backup beepers at 3am, as they brought in an impounded car, and plenty of white noise from the facility’s HVAC units. At least it wasn’t as cold as the Scoutland trip—in fact, the coldest it got was about the same as the warmest at Scoutland. On the other hand, Scoutland didn’t have a problem with bugs. As it turns out, the gnat line has crept up past Savannah, and I’ve added “bug spray” to our must-haves for future trips.

Concentrated joe…

Next morning, I put the backpacking stove on an unused grill, and started making espresso. The other guys were impressed with both the stove and the maker, both of which I bought around 1983 or so. So I played camp barista and helped everyone fortify themselves for the day ahead. Amazing, how a few shots of black espresso go down soooo good when you’re camping out.

Barefoot on the beach. Even if it’s a bit cool.

Because the next event was the whole point of island camping… the beach! If you’ve never been to Tybee, there’s North Beach, pretty highly commercialized and near the lighthouse. But there’s a second beach area that’s a lot quieter, close to the river mouth. The water was about as cold as I expected, which meant I didn’t bring Mason a swimsuit. But that didn’t stop him from kicking off his shoes and plunging in with the other boys anyway. eye roll I figured I had another change of clothes for him, so no biggie. WRONG! I could have sworn I packed some extra pants, but I didn’t. I had an extra shirt, that was it. It required a trip to a Dollar General to find him another pair of pants that only cost $6 and he’ll wear some more anyway. But walking back was pretty miserable for him.

Sleeping was a little tough this trip. Not because it was cold, but Mason was determined to hog the entire air mattress, and I found myself on the verge of falling off several times. No matter what time we went to bed, he woke up at his usual 7am—pretty much before anyone else cared to drag themselves into the world of the living.

So “here comes the rain,” and we all did our personal anti-rain dances—tying down rain flies, moving air mattresses into the middle of the tents, stashing stuff in the tents or cars. I think my own dance steps may have put the final knife in the rain: I got the ponchos and umbrella out of the car, within easy reach, and put the car cover on. 15 minutes later, we had six drops of rain and the sun came out.

Tybee Light in the background

We capped off the weekend with a walk to North Beach on Sunday morning. Mason was mad because he couldn’t jump into the ocean again, but I let him pull up his pant legs and wade. He was okay with that, because the water temperature was (as he put it) “ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE!!!”

Finally, we started back to the manor. Up Boredom Boulevard (a/k/a I–16), more frapps consumed, one more Mason bladder-panic, and returned by six. I got Mason into the bath right away, but I didn’t get my shower until around nine (what I want or need is automatically less important than… well, anything). The tent got a heavy dew fall, and I needed to put it up to air out, and that didn’t happen either. Oh well, I took care of that tonight. The Miata isn’t happy about the garage being occupied, but we’ll all deal. Tomorrow, I’ll pack it up and we’ll be all set for next time.

Speaking of which, I think next time I’ll try using one sleeping bag as a pad on the air mattress, and another as a blanket. And, as Mason pointed out, we need to add pillows to the packing list.

Tech Tuesday: Roll Your Own Writing System, Part 1: Markdown

I’ve said this before, but for people who want to make a living (or even beer money) writing fiction, the best writing advice out there is still Kristen Kathryn Rusch’s: treat it like a business. Simple enough, but the ramifications are as wide as the world of commerce.

• Watch your expenses, but don’t hesitate to spend where it’s going to improve your product.
• Plan time for editing and marketing as well as writing (I haven’t done too well in that regard over the last year).
• Set a budget, and track your expenses (and income) so you know if you’re meeting it.
• Analyze your processes, and look for better ways to do things.

For someone like me, the latter can be dangerous. It’s really easy to go down a rathole, constantly tinkering with stuff instead of actually accomplishing anything. That goes double when I often have to write one-handed, with a baby in my lap who is trying to grab the keyboard or anything else within reach.

Still, I think I might have stumbled across something.

• What if there was a way to write stories, using any computer (or tablet), anywhere you are?
• What if you could preview your writing using a web browser?
• What if you could output your writing in squeaky-clean HTML for producing EPUBs?
• What if you could easily copy your entire oeuvre to a USB drive for backup or to continue writing when you’re offline?
• And finally, what if you could play with different versions of your story to figure what what works best?

In other words, I think I might have found something better than Scrivener. That’s saying a lot; I’ve been using Scrivener for about five years now, and it’s close to ideal for the way I work. The fun part is, it’s possible to keep using Scrivener as long as you want, until you’re ready to let go.

So what is this miracle? Read on…

About Markdown

Markdown was created by John Gruber to make it easier to write blog posts. It has been extended every which way to work with more technical documents, but the vanilla version is well-suited for writing fiction as well as blog posts.

If you’ve ever decorated a text-only email, you already know how to use most of Markdown. Here’s an example that easily covers 90% of what you do in fiction writing:

# The Swamp Road

Night was falling,
yet Joe doggedly marched up the swamp road.
Time was pressing,
after all.

In the flickering light of his torch,
Joe saw two signs:

**SHORTCUT LEFT**

**Do NOT take the shortcut!**

He pondered the advice for only a second.
*Bah*, he thought,
*I have to get home*.

Taking the left fork,
Joe soon found himself sinking in the bog.

Let’s see how this looks when formatted:

The Swamp Road

Night was falling, yet Joe doggedly marched up the swamp road. Time was pressing, after all.

In the flickering light of his torch, Joe saw two signs:

SHORTCUT LEFT
Do NOT take the shortcut!

He pondered the advice for only a second. Bah, he thought, I have to get home.
Taking the left fork, Joe soon found himself sinking in the bog.

It’s pretty easy to see how this translates: blank lines start a new paragraph. Use asterisks to highlight, *for italic* and **for bold**. The number of pound (or hash) characters set the heading level. For example, # Heading 1, ## Heading 2, and so on.

In the example above, I broke lines inside each paragraph so each line is a phrase. That’s not necessary; you can go long and run your paragraphs together, like you would in Scrivener or a word processor. Either way, you’ll get properly-formatted paragraphs.

But I LIKE Scrivener!

Hey, no problem. Scrivener has built-in Markdown support, and can use it to produce cleaner output for publishing than its direct word processor or eBook output. We’ll have a look at how to set things up, and a couple of things to look out for, next week.

Thoughts? Questions? Floor’s open!

Tech Tuesday (on Thursday): Tines 1.11

I didn't get this posted Tuesday. Oh well.

The two biggest components in this release are compatibility enhancements:

• Tines now compiles and runs on Cygwin, something I've wanted for a while. That involved changing escdelay from a variable to a CLI command. The change is backward-compatible; there’s no difference in how it works in .tinesrc and scripts.
• Tines now preserves and (where it makes sense) uses the metadata in the OPML <head>. You can access and change metadata through text variables, and Tines uses reasonable defaults when necessary.

With 1.11.0, Tines is essentially complete. The Creeping Feature Creature will get hungry some day, no doubt, but for now I’m going to focus on making packages available for people who don’t want to compile the app themselves, making the code more robust, and squashing any bugs that turn up. I might tinker with alternative RC files to focus Tines on special purpose uses as well.

In-Tents Weekend

Mason is in Cub Scouts (Tiger) now, and there are a zillion activities happening all the time. We went on his first camping trip over the weekend, over at Scoutland (a Scout Camp on Lake Lanier, near Gainesville).

So I started digging around, looking for all my old camping gear. The Boy had destroyed the big cabin tent, back in his Drunk and Doofus days, and I couldn’t locate anything but my old sleeping bag and my backpacking espresso maker (don’t judge… we’re talking dozens of pre-teen boys running around, wired on s’mores and trail mix, you gotta keep up somehow). Mason didn’t have a bag in any case, so the wife went out and got him a sleeping bag and us a tent.

I found The Boy’s old backpack from his scouting days, and there were a few useful items in it (most useful of all, a drawstring bag for clothes). So we gathered up food and other essentials, and loaded up the Miata—a backpack on wheels—and arrived at the camp as dusk was coming. Scoutland campsites have wooden platforms with metal pipe framework on them for a cabin-style tent, and several people pitched their tents on them. Our “four-person” tent¹ was just slightly too large to fit comfortably on the platform, so we cleared the ground of pinecones and pitched it there. I unrolled our foam pads on the tent floor, put the bags atop them, and shoved our gear to the side. There was just enough room. I hung the battery-powered lantern on the loop at the apex of the tent, and that gave us plenty of light to arrange things as it got dark. Several people were impressed by how much stuff we pulled out of the Miata, by the way. Having gone backpacking a few times turns out to be a useful skill. ;-) For some reason, the parents’ signup sheet asked for age, and I’m pretty sure I was the oldest person there. Growing older, but not up.

The forecast low was 27°F, but that wasn’t a big deal. In fact, a couple of Girl Scouts were sleeping in hammocks. (Don’t mess with Girl Scouts!) As for us, Mason’s bag was rated for those temps, and my bag is an Army surplus down mummy bag, probably good to -40° in its prime. But I learned something important that night: when I was 28, even 38, I could toss my bag onto a foam pad and sleep okay. At 58… not so much. My hip drove into the ground, and now I find the mummy bag too confining, so I guess I need to retire it. The wife suggested (after the fact) I swap bags with Mason, which isn't a bad idea. He woke up once from the cold, and was fine after I told him to just burrow down into his bag & pull it over his head. Around 2 a.m., I fished a pool float out of the trunk of the car, blew it up (which warmed me up as well), and slept well until it deflated.

So Saturday morning was cold as you-know-what. Water buckets were iced over, cars covered in frost, etc. As Mason went to sleep at his usual bedtime, he woke up at his usual 7 a.m. The camp was dead quiet, except for him talking to me… but the Girl Scout leader (who was coordinating the campout for the county troops/packs) heard the noise and got a fire going. Soon, we had bacon and eggs going, and the kids filched marshmallows. Then the boys went running all over the large campsite, leaving the adults to wander around or sit by the fire and try to get warm.

Turns out a couple of the dads in Mason’s pack are very much into these clever things called “Hot Hands.” When you expose them to air and shake them, they produce an exothermic chemical reaction. I brought gloves that were more than adequate for 27°F, and my old ski mittens that would have sufficed for much colder temps, but my feet were cold… and I hate for my feet to be cold these days. So they tossed me a packet of “Toe Warmers,” which work the same way as the Hot Hands do. You take them out of the pack, stick them to your socks, and enjoy your day. At least I did. I also zipped into Gainesville to get an air mattress. For their part, they thought my espresso maker was awesome.

Saturday night was cold, but not as cold as before. That was fortunate, because it started raining around 2 a.m. The hammock’ers, not having thought to put up rain flies, bailed for a tent. Indeed, I think I might have been the only person in the camp who expected rain—as a motorcyclist, I know when you’re outdoors, 30% chance of rain means a near-certainty. The other pack dads left everything out, and I mean everything. So when Mason woke up at 7:15 a.m., declaring “I slept great!” I decided to just load up and go home. I always keep a towel in the Miata (highly recommended for any convertible), so I wiped down the tent and the cooler I left outside, then loaded the little car while Mason had one last run-around with the kids who hadn’t gone home Saturday afternoon. Overall, he had a blast and didn’t really want to go home.

Mason ended up with three patches for the weekend: Family Camping, Leave No Trace (for helping pick up trash), and Polar Bear (for camping in below-freezing weather). The latter is on the way, but he brought the other two home…

I left a blank spot for the Polar Bear patch

We’ll sew them onto his backpack.

---

¹Camping equipment manufacturers love to play fast and loose with capacity. A tent measuring 6 feet by 9 feet can only be considered “four-person” if a) the people in question are children; b) they have no gear. In reality, there is barely enough room for two people and the gear you don’t want to leave outside.

Water, Water Everywhere!

Among his other issues, Charlie has some dietary restrictions. Specifically, he doesn’t tolerate most kinds of formula—Similac Sensitive is the only one we’ve found that 1) doesn’t cause unpleasant reactions; 2) he doesn’t spit out. As he became one year old, WIC added Lactaid (a lactose-free milk brand) to his approved list. “Woohoo,” we said, “maybe a chance to break loose of the formula!”

Nope. It gave him a really bad case of the runs, leading to a bad case of diaper rash. Thus, it fell to me to let him soak in some soothing baby wash while the wife went to baby-sit her dad for a while. Oh, did I mention Charlie loves the water?

So he had a great time. All I had to do was wash his hair, and make sure he didn’t slide forward and bang his head on the back of the sink.

Charlie & Mason Blogging

Mason continues to be one of Charlie's favorite people, as you can see here…

"Are you fighting a… a Diamond Ender Creeper?" "sigh No such thing, Charlie."

Can you believe the little rugrat is a year old now? I mean Charlie, of course. Mason is 7; he only acts like a one year old on occasion. Mason is doing very good in school, especially math, and will be testing for the gifted program early next month. Now if I could only get him more interested in reading.

As for Charlie, we took him to Emory Neurological Evaluation Center earlier this week (at the tail-end of Winter #1) for some tests with a team of psychologists. The schools opened Tuesday, but on a two-hour delay, so we had to keep Mason out of school and take him with us. Give him a fully-charged iPad, and he’s fine with that. They noted Charlie’s issues with coordination and the like, and that his physical appearance indicates Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. (On top of the meth issues. I so want to punch Badger Boobs right now.)

The million-dollar question is, of course, whether he can grow out of all that and lead a normal life. That was not a question they had answers for; but did schedule more tests for next month, including a genetic test.

Still, I see lots of hopeful signs, many that have just started happening. He’s always had good people skills (that, his good looks, and sunny disposition will suit him for management… and even if he isn’t all that bright, that isn’t a handicap for management). He was sick, more on than off, for the last two months but he’s finally moved on past that.

Now that he’s feeling better, he’s acting more aware of stuff going on around him. He’s also fighting sleep tooth and nail, which is only hopeful because The Boy and Mason both did the same and they were both pretty advanced—otherwise, it’s a pain in the butt. Now Daughter Dearest wasn’t much for fighting sleep, and she ended up at least as advanced, so maybe that’s not an indicator. Lately, he wants to squirm off laps and get to the floor, which we tend to forbid unless it’s fairly clean. You can see in his face that he knows he should be able to move himself around by now, and he’s really trying to get it.

But today brought a bunch of “firsts.”

He’s shown a fondness for starches lately (bread, pasta, and now rice). Just this week, he’s really started to get the hang of chewing stuff that isn’t fingers or teething aids. He’ll eat all the bread we’ll give him; usually we’ll break it into small bits and stick it in the ol’ pie hole. Today, the wife put a piece on his highchair tray; he got frustrated after several attempts at trying to pick it up. Me, not knowing about this, tried the same thing a little later. He got it on the second attempt! Then he repeated it, so he’s at least beginning to get the hang of self-feeding. At suppertime, after gobbling his container of baby food, he scarfed a good chunk of potato and a couple spoons of rice, both new foods at least in non-puree form.

In between that, I had him on his play mat on the living room floor. The phone rang, so I laid him on his tummy and grabbed it. I then heard a thump; thinking the wife had come up while I was occupied, I walked through the kitchen to see if she was in the garage. She wasn’t, but I heard Charlie wail. He had somehow gotten off the mat and was in front of Rosie’s pen… a good four feet away, and he had to have turned to get there. He’s not crawling yet, but he can flop from Point A to Point B now. On the bed, I’ve seen him get his knees underneath and scoot forward (especially if I’ve put a toy just out of reach).

With Spring #1 being an unusually warm one, all of us (including Charlie) have been enjoying the outdoors this weekend. If we’re doing stuff, he can at least sit in the stroller and watch. If he gets bored, we just send Mason over to talk to him for a few seconds. We took a brief ride in the Miata with the top down this afternoon, and I’m planning on grilling steaks for lunch tomorrow. In the middle of January, when it’s usually inhospitable outside. I might let him sit in his stroller and watch.

Cyborg-Mom!

Back in October, Mom had a pacemaker installed. It’s a routine thing these days, almost an outpatient procedure. They keep you overnight, wait for the happy juice to wear off, then send you home with a long list of things you can’t do for the next six weeks.

That should have been the end of the story, but would I be blogging about it if that was the case?

To begin with, Mom is pretty dang athletic for being 80, so there isn’t a lot of excess padding where a surgeon can hide a pacemaker. So they just stuck it under her skin, making a nice little lump but otherwise not interfering much. My youngest brother Solar lives near her, so he made sure things like laundry and heavy lifting got taken care of until she was off restrictions.

That should have been the end of the story. Again. But…

Whether it was a matter of the pacemaker being too close to the surface, or one of those airborne things getting into the mix during surgery, an infection set in. One of those nasty antibiotic-resistant hospital infections. Of course, this happened right before Christmas, when we planned to come down. Solar ran out of chill and advised us to cancel our hotel and just stay home. Meanwhile, they yanked the pacemaker and put on (on, not in) a temporary, then started shotgunning the antibiotics.

Wife suggested I go down myself, day after Christmas, and Solar was good with that. He had been taking care of his business and Mom’s, and was going into negative-chill over the hospital wanting to send her home despite never having done that when a patient has a temporary pacemaker. Still, Mom wanted to be in her place, and I suspect the hospital wanted to prevent a possible secondary infection. So I came down, and Solar got to have a break for a while.

Mom looked a lot better than Solar was describing—definitely not 100%, but able to dress herself, fix her own food, and so on. A home nurse came in daily to help keep up with her medications and do blood tests. So here she was: pacemaker taped to her shoulder, a pump pulling the crud out of the infected area, a PICC line in her arm—tubes and machines everywhere. Cyborg-Mom! Her primary complaint was “I only got to play tennis twice before this happened!”

I thought Solar was worrying way too much. Sure, he was comparing Mom to herself at 100%, but she was able to handle the basic tasks of life. We went to the grocery store, she made coffee, and helped me fix a meal or two. I was comparing her to my father-in-law, who only gets out of his chair when he needs to use the can or eat. He completely depends on the wife (mine) to get his meals, arrange his meds, and bathe him. Compared to that, Mom seemed hardly affected… besides being unable to play tennis, of course. I even got to take a couple walks on the beach, where I saw six people using a four-person inflatable float and a melting snowman (sandman). Had to look up the float; I might get one for our week at the timeshare.

Put me in summer and I'll be a… HAPPY SNOWMAN!

So back to Mom. Once they identified the infection (a cousin of tuberculosis), they knocked off the shotgun antibiotics and gave her one or two that had the most effect against the bad buggly. (Good thing, all those drugs were starting to bang on her kidneys a little too hard.) So the infection started clearing up, and they took the pump off. Mom really bounced back after that; she always had to remember to pick up the bag with the pump and make sure the lines weren’t going to snag on something. I kind of missed it; it made a soft fart sound every ten minutes or so, which thoroughly delighted my inner 12-year-old. (“Yeah, Mom, blame it on the pump!”)

So I went home on New Years Eve, and she went into the hospital on the 3rd to get the new pacemaker put in. This time, they put it into a muscle so there wouldn’t be a repeat problem.

That should have been the end of the story. But… are we starting to see a pattern here?

She came home on the 4th, and the very next day she was right back in for a mild heart attack. They ran a catheter in, and found no blockage, so they concluded it was stress-related. (Stress? Now why would she be stressed?)

She got to come home a few days later, and everything is finally more or less on an even keel. We rescheduled our vacation for spring break, I got reservations at the cottages we often stay at, and she should be back to playing tennis by the time we come down in early April.

Not even 2016 could do for Mom. Nobody messes with Mom.

Patient Zero (#FlashFicFriday)

Some of us are trying to bring the fun of flash fiction back to Twitter. Here’s my contribution, inspired by Daughter Dearest’s text this morning: Walmart is empty, like nobody in the parking lot. That would be as much a sign of the zombie apocalypse as anything…

Do join us! Go to the #FlashFicFriday blog and leave your link in the collector.

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Heather was alone in the unruly crowd, but she was closer to the doors now. After all the stress of the Thanksgiving family gathering, her friends Brit and Becks (aka The Bs) invited her to a party followed by Black Friday shopping. Seemed like a great idea at the time. “Maybe it’s food poisoning,” she muttered to herself. Aunt Tammy made the most god-awful side dishes, and insisted everyone get some. Not to put too fine a point on it, she felt like shit. Thank God for the crowd, she thought. It’s the only thing holding me up.

A vision of being a Black Friday statistic brought her to her senses.”Girl up,” she growled. “You’re on a mission.” Big-screen TVs were $125 at Mallet’s (“don’t go to the maul, go to Mallet’s!”) and she meant to get two—one for her, one for her cousin Whitney, the only family member she ever looked forward to seeing nowadays.

She looked at the big digital clock over the doors. 4:54 a.m., and Mallet’s would open at five. Her vision was blurry, and her mind wasn’t much better. She focused, trying to piece together what had happened. She never got hammered enough to black out. Maybe Becks was right, and that guy she had hooked up with at the party gave her a roofie. The Bs ended up carrying her to the car, after threatening the guy’s life, and drove with her window open until she came to.

Her shoulder itched, and she winced as she scratched. A memory sputtered to life: the guy had his hand in her shirt—but behind her neck, gently scratching her shoulder. It felt good, so she hadn’t made him stop. The way it felt now, he must have taken a few layers of skin off. “Some pervs have the weirdest kinks,” she said, and this time the mom in front of her glanced over her shoulder.

Plan. Focus. Get what you came for. The terrified employees lined up a bunch of carts, staggered so you could slip between them to get to the first row. The digital clock went to 4:59, then 4:59:30, then the crowd counted down the last ten seconds.

The doors slid open, the employees got the hell out of the way, and the stampede was on. Heather made the most of her solid build, pushing the mom aside, elbowing her way forward, rolling with her staggering run, letting nobody slow her down. She weaved through the carts, grabbed one in the second row as the first row sprinted into the store, and joined the mad chase.

At Electronics, she found the stack of big-screens, and shoved two onto her cart. Someone grabbed her hoodie, trying to yank her backward, and she stepped back and threw an elbow. The stout middle-aged woman grunted and staggered back, and Heather pushed the cart away from the growing melee around the TVs.

Now that she had what she wanted, her resolve and energy crashed. Slumping against the cart, she trundled to the customer service desk in the back.

“You okay?” the flack behind the counter asked. “Do I need to call 911?”

“No,” she managed to reply. “Just need to rest a couple minutes is all.” She collapsed onto the bench and knew no more.


“Hey. Hey.” Shaking. “Hey. If you’re not sick, you have to go. I’ll call 911 if you want.”

She pushed herself up with a grunt, swaying a little. The TVs were gone, so was her purse, but she had no memory of those things. She was here for…

Rrrrowlrrrrr, went her stomach. She was here to eat. And the meat standing before her was as good a start as any.

Charlie on the Ball

Hmmm… cushy!

As part of Charlie’s state-supported foster care, someone comes by the manor every couple of weeks from Babies Can’t Wait, a sort-of physical therapy program for babies with developmental issues. She gets to play with other people’s babies all day and get paid for it, although the therapy part is very real and not all babies are nearly as good-natured as Charlie. He enjoys the time, because she brings all sorts of interesting stuff, but does get worn out toward the end of the session. He gave her his “OK, I’ve had enough” growl on Thursday as she was close to wrapping up anyway.

Physically, Charlie is behind, although he’s starting to show signs of catching up. The therapist has been working on his sitting and grasping, and recommends we give him lots of “tummy time” so he’ll get the hang of crawling. (Usually, he just flips onto his back and grins.)

More fun than the flop-over game!

We try to do some of the things the therapist does, both to help him practice doing stuff he should be doing and to wear him out a little. So this morning, I laid a blanket over the carpet in our bedroom and sat with him. He immediately flopped over, so I had to catch him, and Charlie thought that was a fun game! I tried a little tummy time as well; the first time he inchworm’ed forward a foot or so then laid there. After that, he just flipped onto his back and waited for me to play with him. So I grabbed a couple large Duplo blocks from Mason’s stash and one of those huge Mega Blocks. New game: picking up the blocks (it was easier with them upside down at first) and waving them around, occasionally smacking himself for the fun of it and chewing on the corners. He preferred the blue blocks to the red one, at least at first… but most importantly, he sat freestyle (no leaning against Granddad) for a good ten minutes. So he’s capable, he’s just a bit lazy. In a previous therapy session, he did a fine imitation of Monorail Cat, a boneless sprawl over the ball both on his tummy and his back. I really wanted to get a pic of him doing that, but this time he was more interested in sitting on it. (Rosie the Boston Terror gets anxious when the therapist balances Charlie on the ball… it’s rather cute.)

I’m not concerned with his mental development. He’s always understood that when he’s hungry, and we take him in the kitchen and start mixing stuff, it means the food is on the way and he’ll stop crying and fussing unless he’s half-starved. (You can see in the pix how many meals he misses…) He vocalizes plenty, and has recently added “joyous ear-splitting screech” to his repertoire. That one he usually saves for Mason, either as a reaction to his clowning or to tell him, “Hey, do something funny!” Charlie probably won’t start talking as early as The Boy or Mason (both could say a few words well before age 1), but he could well talk before he walks.

Right now, he’s sleeping off his floor time with me. As I was up until 1am last night, and had to get up with Charlie at 7:30, I’d like to be doing the same.