When you have consumed all the broth, run to the bed and jump between the prepared sheets, quickly take the clothespins and put one on each big toe. These clothespins must be worn all night, firmly pressed to the nails, at a 45 degree angle from the toes. This simple recipe guarantees good results, and normal people can proceed pleasantly from a kiss to strangulation, from rape to incest, etc., etc.posted by KirkJobSluder at 11:01 AM on May 7, 2011
Recipes for more complicated cases, such as necrophilia, autophagia, tauromachia, alpinism, and others, can be found in a special volume in our collection of Discreetly Healthy Advice.
— Remei Lissaraga Varo, excerpt, “A Recipe: How to Produce Erotic Dreams”
I write the first draft in WriteRoom, though I'm considering giving that up because Hog Bay Software puts me off for reasons too complicated to get into here. If I did, I'd probably just move over to Scrivener, which is great but overkill for my needs, as I'll explain below. Or maybe I'd just use TextEdit, I don't know.Again, I'm not sure how relevant this is to anyone else's workflow, but I guess if I were going to write an epic FPP, I'd probably use the same method.
The text is stored in a plain text document in my DropBox. Any formatting I need to add is done using the truly awesome Markdown, which is essential to anyone writing long-form on the web, but you don't need me to tell you that.
This combination of Dropbox + plain text + Markdown allows me to edit and add to the draft wherever I am. If I'm on my iPhone, I use Nebulous Notes, which gives me the three features I most need in an iPhone text editor:
• True full-screen, with no dumb title bar at the top. (Are there really people who forget what file they're working on and need a banner to remind them?)
• Ability to open a file anywhere in your Dropbox, not just a custom folder
• Totally customizable fonts / text color / background colors
In my experience, every other iPhone text editor does two but not all three. Nebulous Notes, however, meets all three criteria. [And as a bonus, it was created by a MeFite!]
If I'm on a computer that's not tied to my DropBox account, I use TextDropApp.com, a dead simple online text editor for any .txt files you have in your Dropbox. (Why Dropbox doesn't just have an "edit" button on their iPhone app / web frontend is beyond me, though.)
Once the first draft is done, the text comes out of Dropbox and pasted, still in Markdown, to an Etherpad document that's then shared with my beta readers. I use iEtherpad, though there's lots of others out there. TypeWithMe is one, and they seem to have gotten over their server issues. I suppose if I was really hardcore, I'd put an Etherpad installation on my server, but...uh, one day I'm going to die, you know?
After I get everyone's feedback, I collate the changes that I approve of back into the original text document and then do my own edits. When I'm reasonably sure that this latest installment is ready to go, I paste the entire text into Dingus to get the HTML, then paste the code into Wordpress, hit Publish, and feel good about myself for about 90 minutes. After 90 minutes, I start working on the next installment / feeling guilty about not working on the next installment.
posted by chunking express at 4:54 AM on May 7, 2011 [4 favorites]