NOTEPAD++ FOR EVERYTHING

I now use Notepadd++ for all my writing: blogs, books, everything but emails (and it would probably be a good idea to write those there, too).

I just open a new tab and start right out, saving my work as a text file. I write in single space with no indents, leaving an extra line (carriage return) between paragraphs.

I also put a # symbol on its own line to indicate a change of scene. New chapters have titles in all caps, with a couple blank lines separating each from the end of the last one. (That will change in the actual book.) I use a key word in the title (like "chapter" or "chap"), so later I can find those thing for adding go-to-a-new page tags, the id link for tables of content, and so forth.

I put one space between sentences inside paragraphs, the way books (but not manuscripts) are meant to be. (Remember, you're writing the book, not the manuscript for the book. There are no manuscripts anymore.)

I use two hyphens (with no spaces before, after, or in between) to indicate dashes, and three periods for an ellipsis (again with no spaces). I'll want to run an automated search for those items later, so I keep the notation standard. (Of if not standard, consistent.)

I write all I want and revise the text until I'm goofy-headed. The only thing I miss is the Word Count tool. I still have a (semi) working copy of MS Word, so I can copy and paste a WIP there to check the wordage.

But in the indie pub world, the word count is a lot less important than in the trad pub world. If the work comes out short, put a lower price on it. If it's too long, readers love it. After all, they want to be immersed in your fictional world forever. For them, longer is always better.

(Recall that THE LORD OF THE RINGS came out in three volumes because of post-war economics. It was always meant to be one big book.)

Be sure to patch Notepad++ with the Spell Check option. And use it. If there's a highlighted word anywhere in the document, that's the only thing that gets checked. Otherwise, Spell Check starts at the top. If you want to stop halfway through and make some revisions, just highlight the text from there on down to resume spell checking in midstream. Or start again from the top, your choice.

For ebooks, I run the text file through MobiPocket Creator and open the resulting HTML in (where else?) Notepad++. Then I run the (amended) Puctuation Swap Grid, copy and paste the front-end of a standard ebook from "Code of a Short Book," and I'm ready to apply paragraph styles to chapter and section starts. Finally, I grab the TOC and OPF file templates and fill 'em out. (All this stuff is available in the Templates section, on the right-hand sidebar of this blog.)

Next comes GIMP2 and the creation of a cover and title page.

In the meantime, I open the HTML file in Firefox and start proofing. I narrow the window and bump up the font size till I have a Large Print ebook to work with. All its mind-boggling faults show up nicely.

Which is fine, because I've set up plenty of macros in Notepad++ for extensive rewriting (and new writing) in the HTML. Immediately checking the corrected text in the browser is addictive, I've found.

By the way, there's a new version of Notepad++ available. I haven't tried it yet, but expect to soon. Is it too much to hope there's a word count tool built in? (Yeah, probably.)