ING Disease
Jun. 11th, 2004 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsRight now, for various reasons, I'm not writing. This isn't as fatal as it sounds; I have a good dozen or so stories ready to go and I'm busily polishing them, perhaps in some cases just a touch too much.
I've discovered that I have a touch of ing disease. "He put the key into the lock, running up the stairs to get his jacket." Unfortunately, these events happen in order, but the ing construction implies simultaneity. I found a lot of that in amidst my sex scenes, so I've spent my time usefully cleaning up tenses and fixing character continuity issues. The character Wren changes bust size three times in the course of her series, and Wish's vocabulary gets significantly more mature even though it's not supposed to. The latter I can probably work with; Wish is under the impression that the biocybernetics she has installed won't let her mature and she's happy with that; the fact is, however, that she is maturing and she doesn't understand what the biocybe is doing or is supposed to do.
But I'm happy because I'm at least getting it done. The work is slow. Editing always is.
One of my tools for this process is a program I wrote called makework. It's a simple bash script that copies the contents of my Working directory, scrubs it, and puts it into a directory accessible by my narrator suite, the HTML-izer optimized to handle raw text rather than the usual XML. This means that block quotes and poetry and lyrics don't come out right, but I rarely use anything but plain text. It also handles LaTeX conventions for emphasis, which I use when I write. The "final review" of a story is always done in a browser to see what it'll look like when you guys get to read it.
Makework sucks. It blindly copies the entire working directory into a temporary to do scrubbing and analysis, then creates the index for narrator, then copies the scrubbed copies into the webserver folder. On my little laptop, this inefficiency can cost time and serious battery power.
So I re-wrote it in python. Since the index is the last thing written, I compare it's last modify time to everything in the working directory and only process those that have changed. And since it's written in python, there's no context switching or pipe buffering.
Ah, I enjoy my geekiness some days...
I've discovered that I have a touch of ing disease. "He put the key into the lock, running up the stairs to get his jacket." Unfortunately, these events happen in order, but the ing construction implies simultaneity. I found a lot of that in amidst my sex scenes, so I've spent my time usefully cleaning up tenses and fixing character continuity issues. The character Wren changes bust size three times in the course of her series, and Wish's vocabulary gets significantly more mature even though it's not supposed to. The latter I can probably work with; Wish is under the impression that the biocybernetics she has installed won't let her mature and she's happy with that; the fact is, however, that she is maturing and she doesn't understand what the biocybe is doing or is supposed to do.
But I'm happy because I'm at least getting it done. The work is slow. Editing always is.
One of my tools for this process is a program I wrote called makework. It's a simple bash script that copies the contents of my Working directory, scrubs it, and puts it into a directory accessible by my narrator suite, the HTML-izer optimized to handle raw text rather than the usual XML. This means that block quotes and poetry and lyrics don't come out right, but I rarely use anything but plain text. It also handles LaTeX conventions for emphasis, which I use when I write. The "final review" of a story is always done in a browser to see what it'll look like when you guys get to read it.
Makework sucks. It blindly copies the entire working directory into a temporary to do scrubbing and analysis, then creates the index for narrator, then copies the scrubbed copies into the webserver folder. On my little laptop, this inefficiency can cost time and serious battery power.
So I re-wrote it in python. Since the index is the last thing written, I compare it's last modify time to everything in the working directory and only process those that have changed. And since it's written in python, there's no context switching or pipe buffering.
Ah, I enjoy my geekiness some days...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-06-11 11:54 am (UTC)