B1C13

Amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.

This is how my chapters go from a Google doc to a webpage you can read.

First, I spend some a lot of time revising my chapter in a Google doc. In addition to writing good words and good plot points, I also take the text and insert square brackets everywhere I want any special effects to happen. Double brackets indicate dialogue like so

[[Road]] “Lisa, I was wondering if you had eaten yet.”

Single brackets indicate every other effect like so

It was his [drumbeat] duty.

Second, I download the chapter as a text file (.txt) from Google docs and open it in VS Code. I convert the square brackets to HTML tags using the following steps that I have written down for myself in a README.md file:

1. Replace \n\n\n with \n</p>\n<p>\n\t, then add a beginning and ending paragraph tag
   1. The code here simply means that I replace all the line breaks with paragraph tags, which are the HTML version of line breaks
2. Replace _ with <i> or </i>
   1. This italicizes the text that needs italicizing
3. Replace … with <span className="ellipsis">…</span>
   1. This adds extra space after each ellipsis, in line with the design philosophy I talk about in the previous post where I want to make punctuation clearer wherever possible
4. Dialogue replacements
   1. Replace \[\[(.*?)\]\] with <Dialogue name="$1">
      1. This replace double square brackets with a HTML Dialogue tag, which is a custom tag I've created for use in this book. It puts things in speech bubbles.
   2. Add </Dialogue>
      1. This closes the Dialogue tags I added in the previous step
   3. Do searches for “ and fix those
      1. This removes any stray quotation marks that might have been left in the text accidentally
5. Do searches for [ and implement those
   1. This means I should go ahead and implement all the non-dialogue effects now. These effects change a lot from chapter-to-chapter, so I don't have any quick tricks for implementing them.
   2. My general philosophy is "done is better than perfect." I'm fine with writing ugly, brittle code that works.

When I was doing my most intense round of revisions, I aimed to convert one chapter to HTML each week. Each night, I aimed to work for at least an hour. The work was split as follows:

1. Monday: Convert chapter n-1 to HTML
2. Tuesday: Finish HTML conversion, write BTS post for chapter n-1
3. Wednesday: Address editor's comments on chapter n-2
4. Thursday: Revise chapter n
5. Friday: Revise chapter n
6. Saturday: Rest day
7. Sunday: Revise chapter n, send to editor

Unfortunately, the revisions never end. Since the above phase ended, I've done ~3 more rounds of revisions, and counting.