Typesetting and Ebooks

Finished typesetting and ebook-ifying Brass and Steel: Inferno.

The more I deal with typesetting for physical books, and the more trouble I have finding decent ebook readers for that most open of platforms, Linux, the less respect I have for epub and its derivatives. How many readers simply ignore all or most of the work I put into an ebook and do it the way they want? How many of them have broken support? It's infuriating. I can create an attractive book in pdf format. I can create a readable one with nice touches in epub. I guess that will have to do.

Yes, I have become quite the fanboy of XeLaTeX. (except for the stupid capitalization convention of its name.)
-JRS

PS: Also learning to hate Scrivener. It makes organizing novels so much easier, but is so incredibly bad at producing output suitable for intake by other programs. Also, it barely works in Linux, and not at all on non-x86 linux platforms.

Irreconcilable Differences (and Looking Glass) revisited

As I finish typesetting Irreconcilable Differences and tweaking the typeset of Looking Glass, I'm struck by a couple things that characterize my first two published novels:

First, I was a lot less clear on how hackers make a living than I am now. Sign of the times, certainly. I'm sure they knew, but in the early aughties, most hackers we on the outside encountered were the script kiddie variety. Nowadays, of course, they're professional gangsters or selling to professional gangsters, or various government agencies worldwide. In the development of Irreconcilable Differences, it's obvious I gave it more thought, since I had professional operators, military operators, and gangs on the outside.

The other thing is that it's very obvious I had no idea how hard having someone you know die is. I was awfully cavalier about it then.

When I return to writing cyberpunk (and I will) things will be different.
-JRS