alt Hacker News> techfolk who write fiction set up their writing pipelines
And perhaps infinitely procrastinating on the actual writing itself...
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Indeed. One irresistible temptation for coders who go into writing is to bikeshed their pipeline. I know I have spent many hours tweaking my writing pipeline when I should have been writing. I mean, why just write when you can create a Containerfile to build a hermetically sealed image that houses your typesetting system and a dozen carefully chosen fonts, and then you can write scripts managed by a Makefile to launch containers from the image and inject into them your source text and extract from them the typeset PDFs? I mean, surely all of that is essential work on the critical path to getting your writing done. Right?
One writer recently wrote his own program for the job, but at least he eventually finished some books: https://hughhowey.com/neo/
Me, I just write in Emacs, set up a makefile, and export to PDF with Pandoc. But I admire the work to make a comfortable yet undistracting writing environment.