[Speaker 0]: About 3
seconds. And I believe we are live.
Hi Edmund, how are you doing?
[Speaker 1]: Hi, how's it going Leo?
I'm doing well, thanks.
Yourself?
[Speaker 0]: I'm also doing well. So Edmund doesn't have
his webcam on but he will be able to answer
questions that you ask inside of the Azure
pad that I've shared again on IRC.
By the way, we only have 1 question and we
have about 40 minutes of question time,
so feel free to add as many questions as you
want and in the meantime,
we'll get started on the first 1.
Unless, Edmond, do you have anything to say
after your presentation?
[Speaker 1]: No, we can jump in.
[Speaker 0]: Okay, lovely. So first question,
is the index, sorry, does the index really
matter here? I mean his colleague is also
using some A4 paper and you think that the
index card is the most important thing here?
[Speaker 1]: That's a great question.
I mean, I think you can do anything with a
larger piece of paper that you can do with a
smaller piece of paper.
But I actually encourage you to try this out.
I did, not for research for this talk,
but just when I read about Nabokov and his
index cards to begin with,
I kind of tried it out a little bit and wrote
some shorter things on index cards and so on
and there really is something about the size
and the kind of ability to manipulate them.
You really can bundle them and move them
around easier and I think that that I think
he enjoyed that. So sure I mean I think you
can do anything with a4 paper that you could
do with index cards but I think there's
something about that form that lends itself
to the especially to the reorganization maybe
to the focus as well just because it's
smaller but but definitely to the
reorganization.
[Speaker 0]: Definitely So we have a lot more questions
now. So thank you, everyone,
for answering my plea for more questions.
Next question. How do you explore the second
level headings, i.e. The scenes in this
example, without the heading itself,
just the content? Is that clear enough?
[Speaker 1]: Great question. Yeah, so I've tried 2 ways,
sorry, 3 ways with this and landed on 1 that
I like. Originally I used the OX package.
There's an OX ignore thing in there where you
can add an ignore tag to where you don't want
the headings, but you do want the content
exported. I found that a little bit annoying,
just visually annoying,
when I'm, again, My theme here is navigating
100,000 word documents effectively and having
that extra visual noise was kind of a pain.
So I ended up, first I just did like a dumb
ox script as part of my publication kind of
pipeline that removed headlines at the scene
level. And then actually,
because I ended up leaning so heavily on
Pandoc, and Pandoc, for those of you who have
not looked at recent versions of Pandoc,
they've got a really fantastic way to use Lua
at this point to write filters.
So you can kind of take the AST of your
document and run these very simple Lua
filters over it. They used to be in Haskell,
which I'm not smart enough to write Haskell
is 1 of the things that I've discovered.
I keep bouncing off of it,
but I'm just smart enough to write Lua.
And so I use a Lua filter now,
which I'm happy to publish to anyone who's
interested. That basically lets me say,
you know, what level headings to get rid of
the heading, but publish the content.
And part of the reason that's been useful is
that some of the other novels I'm working on
for example have different levels of
hierarchy where maybe there's a part and then
you know at the top level and then chapter
and then scene and it's now the third level
instead of the second and it's much easier in
the Lua to just be like remove the third
level headings or the second level headings
or whatever it is so that's been that's been
helpful.
[Speaker 0]: Great, Moving on to the next question,
slightly off topic, where can we see your
novels?
[Speaker 1]: Oh well yeah, you can,
they're on Amazon, there's 2 of them and a
book of short stories.
I think the short stories and the second
novel, which is called World Enough in Time,
which is the 1 that kind of prompted this
talk, are probably of more interest to this,
to the Emacs focused group.
The first one's like a philosophical murder
mystery, but the World Enough in Time is a
kind of Douglas Adams inspired sci-fi comedy
about kind of hijinks on a relativistic speed
space cruiser, which was a lot of fun to
write. It has a lot of twisty subplots,
which is where I developed that technique of
being able to filter down to tags and see a
reduced version of the novel,
which was very handy when trying to juggle 13
subplots. So yeah, check it out.
[Speaker 0]: Great, we'll make sure that you have the
links available on the talk page afterwards.
Right now I sadly have to host so I cannot
look up the links but we'll make sure or if
[Speaker 1]: I put it in there for you.
[Speaker 0]: anyone in the chat... Oh you did?
Yeah. In the meantime we'll move on to the
next question. Have you looked at the Denote
signature features? The hierarchical nature
of Lumen's ideas and index cards works well
with Denote signatures.
So are you familiar with Denote first?
[Speaker 1]: I am not. No, it sounds like something that I
should check out.
[Speaker 0]: Yeah, Denote is a way to work with slip
boxes. We talked a little bit about it
earlier today. We talked about Orgroam,
we talked about Denote as well as a lighter
alternative to Orgroam.
And yeah, the organization with index cards
feels like it's something that would highly
benefit from linking and back links and any
kind of UX functionality for relating pieces
of information. So yeah,
definitely look it up.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, I'm a heavy org-roam user.
I use org-roam for a lot of different stuff
and I would love, I will definitely check out
Denote as an alternative.
[Speaker 0]: Sure, I'm not particularly personally
familiar with what Signature is within Denote
and it'd be great if the person who asked the
question could perhaps provide more details
so that Edmund could get a little more
information when he returns to the document.
But yeah, if you're using Org-ROM,
you're already within the mindset that you
need, and perhaps you'd gain a little bit
extra stuff from using Dino's signature,
I assume. We have 8 minutes.
We're still good on time.
Next question, do you have a workflow
combining handwritten index cards and org
mode?
[Speaker 1]: Great question. I do not.
I do write by hand when I get,
I don't know what a good term for it is,
I'll call it like editorial paralysis or
something when I find it very hard to move
forward in something because I keep going
back and tweaking. And I will handwrite stuff
at that point and then type it in because
it's so much harder to get stuck in editing
mode when you have to move forward on the
page. I don't use index cards.
In the blog article that I link in my talk,
the ewj.io slash emacs 1,
I did try using handwritten or spreadsheet
outlines at 1 point and found them very,
very clumsy for novel writing just because I
do so much, I mean, I do so much revision
that moving things around meant that I had to
keep 2 things in sync with each other,
the pros and the outline.
And that was what really led me to Org Mode
as a way to keep the, again,
I think part of the key for me is keeping the
outline and the pros right next to each other
in a way that they move around which is just
really, I don't know, for me really really
powerful.
[Speaker 0]: Okay great, so we finished the list of
questions available on the pad,
but I see that some people have joined us on
BBB, so hi everyone. If you have any
questions feel free to unmute yourself and
ask them. Otherwise, we might go on a break.
So I'm going to give you about 10 seconds to
unmute yourself. Or if you just want to add
more questions on the pad,
that's also fine. And that'll give you about
30 seconds. Otherwise,
we'll need to go on a break.
And in the meantime, I'll thank you,
Edmund, for your presentation,
because it's always nice,
you know, we The reason why we have 2 tracks,
and we've been having 2 tracks for the last 2
or 3 editions of EmacsConf is because it's
really nice to have those talks which are
still related to Emacs and to far distance
developments because we are obviously using
packages. But it's really nice to see when we
foray into other areas like writing or any
kind of academia-based topics.
So thank you, it's really nice.
It brings different colors to the spectrum of
what EmacsConf is and what ultimately Emacs
is as well. Thank you.
[Speaker 1]: Well thanks to everyone who tuned in and Leo
thanks to you and all the other organizers
for putting this together.
Appreciate it.
[Speaker 0]: Thank you. All right I think we're going to
go on a little break for 5 minutes because I
don't see other questions being asked.
So everyone we'll see you again in 5 minutes
and thank you again, Edmund.
[Speaker 1]: Cheers.