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How to Convert Long Word Documents into Markdown for Import into Obsidian

I love Obsidian. It’s a desktop wiki with local storage, meaning the pages in the app are just markdown files on your computer. If you’re running Linux or Ubuntu for Windows, you can do a lot of quick file manipulation by dropping into a command line interface, including creating new files. Have a dozen markdown files about your favorite episodes of One Piece? You can create a folder under the wiki root, drop those files in there, and boom, they’re in your wiki, all ready to be automatically indexed and cross-referenced.

Using this feature, we can quickly pull into the 120K+ words from your novels, split them into chapters, and make them searchable and interlinkable pages in Obsidian. And it’s not that hard, either. It barely took me several tries to get it right!

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Why Do This?

I write novels in an ongoing anthology series that takes place in a shared universe where technology has progressed unchecked. The books share characters, organizations, places, and more between them, which means that anytime I use something from a previous book, I have to cross-reference and make sure I’m not creating a continuity error.

Consider a problem like: Have I used the name Terrance Bottomfeather before?To find out, I’d have to open eight large Word documents and run a search, which is tedious. I’d much rather have the text from all eight novels inside Obsidian and therefore searchable all at once.

I’m sure this a common problem.

Convert Word Documents to Markdown

The first step is taking your .docx file and turning it into a .md file. You can do this in Ubuntu with pandoc. Once you have it installed, you just have to feed it the right arguments:

pandoc -f docx -t markdown vise-manor.docx -o vise-manor.md

You can read up on what the options mean, but basically it’s saying take this docx file and output it to an md file. That’s the official scientific explanation.

You’ll get a huge file as a result:

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ ll
total 1436
drwxr-xr-x 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   4096 Sep 29 10:01 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   4096 Sep 29 09:59 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 615787 Jan 20  2022 vise-manor.docx
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 815643 Sep 29 10:01 vise-manor.md

You can use less or head to verify the conversion.

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ head vise-manor.md
ALSO BY DANIEL VERASTIQUI

*Xronixle*

*Veneer*

*Perion Synthetics*

*Por Vida*

Now, you could drop this file directly into Obsidian, but that’s a bit unwieldy. Since the content is already arranged in chapters, let’s just go ahead and chop it up.

Cut Markdown Files into Chapters

This part calls again for pandoc and some minimal CLI scripting. Essentially, we’re going to be converting the markdown file into an EPUB archive and then unpacking the EPUB to convert the xhtml chapters into markdown. Look, it doesn’t have to make sense. Just know that it works.

You may get some warnings, but you can ignore them, especially this one:

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ pandoc -f markdown -t epub -o vise-manor.epub vise-manor.md
[WARNING] This document format requires a nonempty <title> element.
  Please specify either 'title' or 'pagetitle' in the metadata,
  e.g. by using --metadata pagetitle="..." on the command line.
  Falling back to 'vise-manor'
[WARNING] This document format requires a nonempty <title> element.
  Please specify either 'title' or 'pagetitle' in the metadata,
  e.g. by using --metadata pagetitle="..." on the command line.
  Falling back to 'vise-manor'

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ ll
total 1840
drwxr-xr-x 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   4096 Sep 29 10:09 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   4096 Sep 29 09:59 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 615787 Jan 20  2022 vise-manor.docx
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 412195 Sep 29 10:09 vise-manor.epub
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 815643 Sep 29 10:01 vise-manor.md

Now unzip the EPUB archive.

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ unzip vise-manor.epub
Archive:  vise-manor.epub
 extracting: mimetype
  inflating: META-INF/container.xml
  inflating: META-INF/com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml
  inflating: EPUB/content.opf
  inflating: EPUB/toc.ncx
  inflating: EPUB/nav.xhtml
  inflating: EPUB/text/title_page.xhtml
  inflating: EPUB/styles/stylesheet1.css
  inflating: EPUB/text/ch001.xhtml
  inflating: EPUB/text/ch002.xhtml
  inflating: EPUB/text/ch003.xhtml
  inflating: EPUB/text/ch004.xhtml
  inflating: EPUB/text/ch005.xhtml
  inflating: EPUB/text/ch006.xhtml
  inflating: EPUB/text/ch007.xhtml
--OUTPUT REMOVED--

Did you see that? Converting to EPUB automatically separated everything into chapters. They’re in XHTML format right now, but we can fix that.

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ for chapter in EPUB/text/*.xhtml; do pandoc -f html -t markdown -o ${chapter/html/md} ${chapter}; done;

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ ll EPUB/text/
total 2364
drwxr-xr-x 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  4096 Sep 29 10:12 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  4096 Sep 29 10:10 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  2229 Sep 29  2023 ch001.xhtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  1181 Sep 29 10:12 ch001.xmd
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  1036 Sep 29  2023 ch002.xhtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   305 Sep 29 10:12 ch002.xmd
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 14026 Sep 29  2023 ch003.xhtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 12360 Sep 29 10:12 ch003.xmd
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 14818 Sep 29  2023 ch004.xhtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 13056 Sep 29 10:12 ch004.xmd
--OUTPUT REMOVED--

Unzipping the EPUB got us chapters in XHTML format. Now we have duplicated those into XMD format. The next step is to rename all those files.

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ for i in EPUB/text/*.xmd; do mv -- "$i" "${i%.xmd}.md"; done

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ ll EPUB/text/
total 2364
drwxr-xr-x 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  4096 Sep 29 10:15 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  4096 Sep 29 10:10 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  1181 Sep 29 10:12 ch001.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  2229 Sep 29  2023 ch001.xhtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   305 Sep 29 10:12 ch002.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  1036 Sep 29  2023 ch002.xhtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 12360 Sep 29 10:12 ch003.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 14026 Sep 29  2023 ch003.xhtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 13056 Sep 29 10:12 ch004.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 14818 Sep 29  2023 ch004.xhtml

Those MD files are now ready to move into Obsidian. Just make sure you know where you want them and use the mv command.

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:~/tmp$ mv EPUB/text/*.md /od/writing/Obsidian Wiki/Vinestead Universe/zFull Text/vise-manor/

dverastiqui@Ginsberg:/od/writing/Obsidian Wiki/Vinestead Universe/zFull Text$ ll vise-manor/
total 940
drwxrwxrwx 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   512 Apr 19 13:40 ./
drwxrwxrwx 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   512 Sep 21 19:37 ../
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui  1181 Apr 19 13:40 ch001.md*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui   305 Apr 19 13:40 ch002.md*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 12360 Apr 19 13:40 ch003.md*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dverastiqui dverastiqui 13056 Apr 19 13:40 ch004.md*

Now you should be able to open Obsidian and see the new content.

Congrats! You did it! Enjoy searching your previous novels with ease!

References

  • https://medium.com/geekculture/how-to-easily-convert-word-to-markdown-with-pandoc-4d60878ccc64
  • https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-rename-multiple-files-on-linux
  • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33889814/how-do-i-split-a-markdown-file-into-separate-files-at-the-heading

The Author Recommends: Das Keyboard Professional 6

Although I’m a big believer in YNAB, there are just some things in life for which you cannot have a budget. One of those is books (obviously), another is Pop Tarts, and the third is anything that makes your job as an author easier. Yearly subscription for Microsoft Word even though it used to be a one-time fee? Sure! Yearly subscription to Novlr even though you only use it for a total of three months every two years? Yes! $200 every couple of years for a new Das Keyboard mechanical keyboard even though your last one still works great? Shut up, and take my money, good sir.

Okay, in all honesty, I skipped the Pro 5 version. I’m not made of money. Plus, the 4 was working so well–why mess with perfection? I’ll tell you why! Because you can! It just so happened I found myself with a little extra coin in my pocket when Das Keyboard released the Professional 6 last month (or September). I ordered it a few days after its release, and since they’re based here in Austin, Texas, I received it pretty quickly. I couldn’t wait to see how it compared to the 4!

Obligatory Photos

One thing I immediately noticed was how much smaller the 6 is. The first picture doesn’t do it justice, but look how they stack up in the second. The bezel is thinner, the flare in the upper right is less pronounced, and somehow it just feels tighter… less… significant. No, that’s not the right word. Ugh, they should have sent a poet.

I suppose what it lacks in height and width, it makes up for in girth. Look at that thick boy 6 (bottom) compared to the 4 (top). Your fingers are definitely sitting a little higher off the desk now.

The world is moving to USB-C, and Das Keyboard is no exception. Although they were kind enough to include an adapter so I can still plug it into my aging PC, I was kinda bummed to lose the two USB ports on the top. They’re USB-C now, and I don’t have anything to plug into them. So they’re just sitting there, unused, like the coleslaw in my fish combo at Long John Silver’s.

Listen, people. I’m a “professional” writer, okay? I don’t go in for those gimmicky LED backlights that coruscate (see?) through the entire color wheel. I don’t even look at the keys, so why would I need them lit up? Honestly, the LEDs are a major reason I skipped the 5. Too busy. Too much. Calm down, keyboard!

That said, I like the subtle glow of the keyboard now. It makes it feel more “alive” on my desk without being distracting. A button lets you adjust the brightness, which is appreciated.

Initial Impressions

The 6 I ordered used the same Cherry MX Brown switches I have on my 4, so the typing experience was more or less the same. There was no loss of speed or accuracy. There’s a slight tactile difference to the keys (same as between the Pro 4 and Ultimate 4 that I use at work). It types fast as hell and I love it.

I may be the only one who can hear it, but there is a definite metallic squink present during typing if you are in a very quiet room, audible even over the clacking of the keys. I imagine it has something to do with the metal clasps under the bigger keys, but who knows. It’s not enough to make me complain, and I always have some music going anyway.

After a couple of days, I realized one of the Windows keys wasn’t working. Thinking I had a defective keyboard, I wrote into their support. They were helpful and informed me I would need to flash the firmware. That’s all well and good, but this is the app they told me to download:

Not for nothin’, but I get real skittish about clicking buttons I can’t read. It did resolve my problem though, so that’s a plus.

Final Thoughts

I’ve been using the Das Keyboard Professional 6 for about a month now while working on a new book. I can’t say there is a huge improvement over the 4, but it is definitely the kind of rock-solid mechanical keyboard you’d expect from this company. Ultimately, I consider it a good purchase, not only because I have a new shiny keyboard, but also because I get to support an Austin company that I’d definitely work at if they offered me a job. I will test keyboards until my fingers fall off if that’s what it takes!

If you’ve got a Pro 4 or 5, you could consider skipping this upgrade unless you’re swimming in money from all your Kindle Unlimited reads. If you’re 3 or earlier, it is definitely time to upgrade.

I don’t know how authors write without a mechanical keyboard, and I don’t know how I’ll ever write without a Das Keyboard. A+++ would buy again.

Visit them at daskeyboard.com.

The Minimum Jetpack Plan Needed to be Included in WordPress Reader

With a baby due any day now, I’ve been paying close attention to my annual subscriptions to things like Canva, Netflix, and of course, Jetpack. If you don’t know, Jetpack is a plugin that adds a bunch of extra features to your WordPress blog. Those features used to be contained in a single subscription, but now they’re available a la carte. With the goal of saving some money in mind, I started to wonder, What’s the minimum Jetpack plan required to be included in WordPress Reader?

Hopefully, it doesn’t come as a surprise that without a Jetpack subscription, your blog posts aren’t included in WordPress Reader. That seems strange, but of all the Jetpack features I care about, that would be the most important to me. Aside from spamming Twitter with my blog posts, I don’t know how else to put them in front of people other than through organic Google searches.

There are other features like anti-spam, site search, and security scanning, but I feel like those are for bigger sites with a lot more traffic than my little blog gets. None of the features explicitly say inclusion in WordPress Reader, so I did what any reasonable person would do, I asked them.

I shot a note to Jetpack Support

I see that the Jetpack plans have changed since I last renewed. Is there a bare minimum subscription that is required so that blog posts show up in the WordPress reader? Or is just having the Jetpack plugin (with no plan) sufficient to be included?

Having never interacted with Jetpack Support, I fully expected a form response that didn’t answer my question in the slightest. Instead, I got a note back from Kellie, a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.

For your site to appear in any search results for posts or tags on the WordPress.com Reader, your site will need to have a paid Jetpack plan which includes backups. 

That being the case, the minimum subscription required in our current plan offerings would be one of our Jetpack Backup upgrades: https://jetpack.com/upgrade/backup/

They included a bunch of other helpful info and links, but I was really just happy to get a straight answer.

So there you go: the minimum subscription required in the current plan offerings would be one of the Jetpack Backup upgrades.

Compared to the old plans, the Jetpack Backup upgrade is $20 more per year–not exactly what I was looking for. I could keep renewing at the old rate, but the point of the exercise was to save money.

Since Linode already provides daily VM snapshots, I don’t really need most of the Jetpack Backup features. Couple that with low traffic, and the CDN features aren’t really necessary either. There’s enough doubt there to make me want to let the plan expire and see what that does to my traffic.

Will my site get noticeably slower?

Will spam accounts stop liking my marketing posts?

Will my comments be overrun with garbage?!

Who knows what the future will bring, but in a world where everything is a subscription, something’s got to give. Sometimes, I feel like I start subscriptions without ever truly considering their value. Does inclusion in WordPress Reader help me sell books? Because that’s the point of all this, right? Get traffic, advertise your books, convert those views into clicks, into sales, into money, into pizza rolls, into happiness?

Yes. The answer is yes.

Lastly, as someone who works in the customer service / success / satisfaction field, Jetpack Support is awesome. Now, I’ve only ever contacted them once, but I was impressed by their entire demeanor and follow-up. I’m always on the lookout for customer service styles to emulate with my team, and Jetpack Support is now on that list alongside You Need a Budget and Zappos.

Book Marketing: Having Fun With Your Built-in Audience

I started self-publishing in 2004, and it took me a long, long time to figure out what most authors already knew: you don’t market to friends and family. For one, they’re often not your target cyberpunk-loving audience. Second, if they do buy your book, it will be because they either love you or genuinely enjoy your work. Either way, it’s a limited audience, and your efforts (and money) are better spent elsewhere. But… that doesn’t mean you can’t tell them you have a new book coming out. And since you’re just telling them, and not marketing, you can have a little fun with it.

Let’s Get Physical

I’ve tried and failed to build a newsletter following. My website is only popular with crawlers. And Twitter… well, I might as well be screaming into a Home Depot bucket. So what’s a guy to do if he wants to get his message in front of friends and family that are used to ignoring him on the world wide web? 😉 You’re damn right: give them something to hold in their hands. And not only that, but deliver it right to their home where they feel safe and secure.

Luckily, Vise Manor happens to be a book about ten strangers invited to a secluded mansion in the New York countryside, so it was pretty clear what I had to do: send friends and family and invitation to dinner, drinks, and a demonstration.

Designing the Invite

Since this isn’t marketing and we’re just having fun, I decided to make the invite purposefully confusing. That is, I wanted it to look like a real invitation and NOT be apparent that it was a piece of advertising until they turned the card over. I used the actual invitation in the book as a guide and whipped this up in Canva.

Canva has a ton of templates, so it was easy to simply choose one, plug in the info, and boom, a fancy invite that I could send to friends. I love how there’s no indication on the front that this invite is from me, Science Fiction Author Daniel Verastiqui. It actually doesn’t say who the invite is from (and I put no return address on the envelope), which would make any reasonable person flip the card around for answers.

Now, at this point, they would know it was from me, but it’s still not clear this invite is related to a book.

I have to admit, thinking about all of their confused faces made me laugh, probably too hard and for too long. Why do I get so much joy from messing with these wonderful people? Am I sick? Do I purposely push away the people I love?

Anyway, you can order printed invites directly from Canva. Just make sure you choose the thicker paper. The basic version is just too flimsy.

Bonus: Because Canva uses free Google Fonts, you can easily recreate the invite as a webpage. See: danielverastiqui.com/books/vise-manor

The Reveal

I opted to spell out the website on the back of the invite instead of using a much cooler QR code. Asking people to blindly follow a QR code is probably just a step too far. But, if they see my name, maybe they’ll drop that URL into their browser and get this:

The body text makes it clear this is marketing for a book. But again, this is really just an FYI, so I’m not doing any real selling on this page. Just: here’s a book, if you want it, great, if not, no biggie. Throw in a couple buttons and it should be easy for the visitor to move forward.

Clicking the Vigorously Accept button takes you directly to Amazon where you can preorder the Kindle version of Vise Manor. And that’s what most people did. Only a few dared to click the With Sincere Regrets button, but I was ready for them. I let them click the button, but then:

Good UX means guiding the visitor to the desired conclusion. A friendly warning message makes it clear that declining is not an option, while visually, the With Sincere Regrets button is moved to the far right, like sliding a knife out of a child’s reach at the dinner table.

And if they click it again?

Honestly, they brought it on themselves. A small script notifies me that a visitor has declined twice, and I go out and steal a puppy from a child. I’ve had to do this three times so far, and though it hurts me as a decent human being, it’s what the visitor deserves for rejecting not just my book but me as an artist and unique individual.

The ReactionS

I could not have asked for better reactions from friends and family. I think the reason I play around with them is because they’re good sports, and so many of them were eager to share their stories of excitement, confusion, and disappointment.

Better still were the people I got to speak to in person who regaled me with stories of confusion and fist-shaking. Common to all these stories is the fun factor. It was something different, a brief respite from the horrific 24-hour news cycle and the impending stress of the holiday season. Compared to simply walking up to a friend and saying I have a new book out; buy it, this way was much more entertaining for all involved.

In fact, I’ve decided that this is how I will do all my fun marketing going forward. You never know when something is going to show up in the mail from your old pal Daniel. What will he send next?! You’ll just have to wait to find out.

And if I don’t have your address, and you love fun, feel free to opt-in to physical, privacy-invading mailings.

The Results

I sent out physical invitations to everyone I thought would appreciate them, and that was around seventy people. It would have been more, but it turns out I don’t know that many people, let alone have their physical mailing addresses.

The response rate (those who visited the website) was about 60%. They came in from all over the country, and it was pretty awesome to watch.

The preorder rate was about 50%. Now, thirty-five preorders is not going to land you on the Amazon Best Seller list on launch day, but it’s a good start. Remember, your friends and family are your built-in audience. So long as you don’t market to them (or worse, try to guilt them), they’re gonna help you out. So bank those built-in preorders and move on to your regular marketing.

I was expecting maybe a third of my recipients to bite, but I think a fun invite and a low price really helped convince some to buy. Add in the preorders generated by Amazon Advertising, and I’m extremely pleased with the results. Pre-sales marketing is moving along really well, and I have my friends and family to thank for this initial bump.

The Bottom Line

Writing is fun, but historically, marketing has not been. Well, there’s no reason it has to stay that way. From now on, we’ll find a way to have fun with our built-in audiences: family, friends, neighbors, fellow indie publishers, Door Dash drivers, landscapers, etc.

Life is too short for anything else.

Vise Manor hits shelves on March 1, 2022. If you haven’t preordered yet, well…

preorder vise manor

The Lifecycle of Independent Publishing as I Understand It (2021 Edition)

If there’s one thing in this world that I truly love, it’s process. Process is what gives life meaning. It tells me what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Unfortunately, process does not spring spontaneously from the ether (nor do you get it from a single blog post that claims to teach you How to Write a Novel in 5 Easy Steps); it must be refined over the years. After independently publishing NINE books since 2004, I’m still updating the way I put out books.

Here is my current process, pared down to the bare essentials.

Step 1: Write the Book

What fun! This step is full of late nights and endless glasses of alcohol. Creativity flows from your fingers like human waste from a broken sewer pipe. You create a world, populate it with flawed characters, and watch the chaos ensue. 150,000 words and many, many revisions later, you have yourself a book.

Cost: Time, blood, sweat, tears, proper liver function

Step 2: Pay Someone to Edit/Proof Your Book

You can’t trust yourself or your canine writing partner to edit your book, so you need to hire a professional to look over your work of art. Hope you had some money saved, because good editors and proofers cost a pretty penny.

Cost: $500 – $2,500

Step 3: Pay Someone to Design a Cover

The last thing you want is your book appearing on Amazon with a cover that looks like you designed it yourself. Don’t judge a book by its cover is terrible advice when it comes to marketing your book. Hire a pro. Just hire a pro.

Cost: $200 – $500

Step 4: Pay Amazon to Advertise It

I’ve only found one method of advertising that produces results, and that’s Amazon’s own advertising platform. Create your ads, set your keywords, and give it a healthy budget. Watch the sales and Kindle Unlimited reads come pouring in!

Cost: $300 – $1,000 monthly

Step 5: Use Royalties to Pay for Ongoing Advertising / PROMOTIONS

Did you earn less in royalties than you spent in advertising? If so, you’ll need to pay yourself back first. Isn’t that funny? You put a book on Amazon, pay Amazon to advertise it, and then give all the money you earn back to Amazon to continue advertising it! It’s a vicious cycle, but fingers crossed you can break out of it one day.

Cost: Everything you earned

Step 6: Go Back to Step 1

Now you’re done. Or at least, I am. As you can see, my process doesn’t include any extraneous steps like:

  • Querying the manuscript
  • Advertising on Facebook / Twitter / Pinterest / Tik-Tok / AppChat / Fartbook
  • Advertising on mailing lists or daily deals sites
  • Advertising on Bookbub
  • Running giveaways on Goodreads so winners can resell the books on eBay
  • Maintaining a social media presence of any kind

It’s a simple process.

  1. Create product
  2. Advertise product
  3. Sell product
  4. Repeat

For a Limited Time Only

I suppose it comes down to what you’re willing to do to make your dreams of becoming a best-selling Science Fiction author come true… and how much time you have to commit to it. I make time for writing. Before exercising, the full-time job, and sometimes even my family, I make time for writing. The actual putting of words on the page is #1, but everything else like marketing and social media are so low on the priority list that I’m surprised I even get to them.

After almost twenty years, I think I’ve reached the point where I’ve decided this is how much I’m going to do, and that’s it. In some ways, it’s freeing. I know exactly what I’m doing with my stories, which steps to follow, and when to start over again. My newsletter may not have thousands of subscribers, my blog millions of visitors, or my Facebook fan page billions of Likes… but there will be dozens of my novels out there by the time they put me in the dirt or transfer me to a synthetic body.

And that means I get to write those novels, which honestly, is the only part of this racket that I enjoy.

Now That It’s Done, What Do We Call It?

As a writer, I reserve the right to complain about the titling of books. In fact, there are a lot of things I am entitled to complain about, and I will, at length, until there is no more space left on the internet. Today, we’re talking titles because as of this morning, I have finished the initial 60 chapters of Vinestead Anthology Book 7 Draft 1. And though I have four little baby epilogues to write, it’s time for this book to get a name. The only problem is, I have committed to doing a better job of choosing a title this time around. As it turns that, that’s incredibly difficult and horrible.

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Louis Sachar and the Literary IDGAF

For the first three years of his life, my son has enjoyed classic books like Goodnight Moon, The Pout-Pout Fish, and The Going to Bed Book. More recently, I’ve been trying to expose him to more mature books like The Ghost on Saturday Night, My Teacher Fried My Brains, and of course, the absolute best children’s book in history, Sideways Stories From Wayside School by Louis Sachar. I can usually get a page or two into those before he complains how long is this story? And when I calmly explain to him how much of an impact Sideways had on me as a child and an adult, he pretends to get tired and fall asleep. Such is parenthood.

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A Month with Novlr

NaNoWriMo is coming up soon, which means a new crop of writers will be looking for the right software to help write their 50,000-word opus. Enter Novlr, a web-based writing platform that is simple, clean, and eager to motivate you to reach your goal. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo for the first time, Novlr is a great choice. But what about the rest of us? What about the seasoned amateurs who haven’t done NaNo (as the kids called it back then) since they were tiny little dystopian cyber-thriller writers? Is Novlr a good choice for writing novls? Let’s take a look.

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