rowyn

As I mentioned in my September post, I purchased Atticus this month, to give it a try.

Back when I was using the SFWA forums, in 2016 or so, Vellum was the publishing software for self-pub authors. It offered quick, easy, painless generation of ebook and print book files from a Microsoft Word doc. Users described it as “format your book in Microsoft Word, upload it to Vellum, and five minutes later Vellum generates a book file for you.” The catch?

Well, the big one is that the software is only available for the Mac.

The other disadvantage is that Vellum had limited customization options. You got an e-pub out of Vellum that looked crisp and professional and like everyone else’s e-pub out of Vellum. But most readers are not that attentive to the little details that go into the book-making process. They want to read the book, not admire the layout choices. (To be honest, sometimes when publishers do fuss about the details, like making sure to use a specific unusual font for an epub, I will override their decision and use one I prefer). Numerous indie authors recommended Vellum. People who didn’t use Macs recommended Vellum and renting time on Mac-in-the-Cloud to use it. I never saw anyone recommend a different software package. Don’t get me wrong: there were people using other publishing software.

But they didn’t recommend what they were using.

The combination of “Alinsa likes formatting my books for me” and “I don’t want to learn how to use Mac-in-the-Cloud in order to format my books” deterred me from investigating Vellum personally.

Then, perhaps a year and a half ago, I heard about Atticus. It was new (note: I hadn’t heard it recommended before because it didn’t exist before). It promised to do the same thing that Vellum did only better, cheaper, and -- most importantly to me -- available on Windows (also Linux, Mac, and Chromebook).

Now, I’ve never used Vellum, and I can’t speak for what it’s like or whether Atticus is better or worse. My experience with Atticus is also the first time I have formatted my own book for publishing. So this is my experience as a total noob to the process.

My personal workflow also presents some particular challenges to formatting. First, I don’t use Microsoft Word for writing at all. Second, I haven’t consistently used any platform for writing. I do most of my writing in Google Docs, but I’ve also used writing gamification sites: 4thewords.com and soulscribesgame.com. The formatting in my work is wildly inconsistent. If you use Microsoft Word to write, it will automatically make many small formatting changes without you noticing, unless you disable them. Two hyphens in a row will be turned into an en-dash character. Three periods in a row will be turned into an ellipsis character. Straight quote marks will be turned into curly quotes, usually facing the correct direction. (These are some of the reasons no one wants to write code in MS Word.)

Most of the software I use doesn’t do any of that -- or if it did, copy-pasting it from one program to another undid it.

Alinsa gave me a checklist of the steps she’s always gone through for me:

• find places where a word in the middle of an italic phrase is unitalicized as an emphasis, and replace with bold italic as the emphasis
• make sure all straight quotes are correctly replaced with 'smart' quotes
• replace -- and --- with appropriate en-dash and em-dash characters
• make sure em-dashes are used consistently (interruptions and start and end of quoted speech, interrupted sentences at end or start of paragraphs
• make sure there's no spaces between em-dash and closing quote in these cases
• make sure ... turns into proper ellipsis characters
• find places there are four or more periods in a row and make sure that's intended (could be ellipsis + period, but could also be a typo)
• also check for places there are two (and exactly two) periods in a row, since that's almost always a typo
• make sure ellipsis characters followed by a punctuation mark are formatted correctly (I have a layout macro that does this for me) since in print layouts at least things don't always look quite right with default spacing if you just do ellipsis character + punctuation
• Replace space with non-breaking space anywhere there is a space + en-dash, so that line wraps always happen after the dash, not before
• Make sure spaces after "Mr." "Mrs." etc are correctly marked as normal spaces and not sentence-ending ones (to get the spacing right during typesetting) -- you 99% probably don't care about this, but just for completeness
• Make sure places where there's an apostrophe followed by a quote mark, or visa versa, are marked to render correctly and look ok in print
• When there are punctuation in the middle of apostrophe-then-quote, make sure it happens in the right place (e.g. generally ’,” looks better (especially in print) than ,’”
• check for wayward backtick (`) characters
• check for instances of two capital letters in a row followed by a lower case letter, which probably indicates a word that was supposed to be CApitalized but had a minor excess of shift key when being typed
• make sure any tables (e.g. for Wisteria's list of pros and cons of her suitors) lay out correctly in all readers & print
• make sure & characters didn't get accidentally interpreted as HTML or other markup
• check for periods without spaces following (usually wrong unless part of an acronym/initialism)
• verify correct title case on chapter headings

I exported my Google doc to MS Word (so I could use VBA macros) and addressed most of the above using macros or find & replace (or MS Word’s spell/grammar check, which caught approximately a million correct things but also the occasional error. I felt like it asked a hundred times “Are you sure you meant 'its' and not 'it's'?” or vice versa, and its suggestion was correct exactly zero of these times. NOT EVEN ONCE).

In addition to the steps above, to import to Atticus, I prepared the document by having it contain only the book contents (no front or back matter; Atticus handles those inside the software and says not to import them), and by turning all my section breaks into * . (Atticus calls the image used for the section break an “ornamental break”. These come up when you have a break within a chapter.) Chapter breaks are indicated by using the “Header 1” style for the chapter title, which I already do so that required no change.

Much of my initial experience with Atticus was “upload document, look at epub, realize I’d forgotten to convert something because I hadn’t thought to ask Alinsa for a checklist yet, fix it in Word, repeat.”

Doing front and back matter in Atticus was a little fussy because Atticus doesn’t like formatting from other software packages. So for my “Also by” section, I’d copy-paste the blurbs with no formatting, and then reformat them in Atticus.

I also discovered that Atticus centered all text in the “Also by” section, which absolutely mystified me at first. And looked terrible, since I had several book blurbs listed. Eventually, I realized that Atticus expected me to list only titles. Ohhh.

I thought about listing only titles, but instead I copied my blurbs into a different back matter type and retitled it as “Other Books by L. Rowyn”. (Atticus has a bunch of specific back matter types but it’s perfectly happy to let you rename them as whatever you like). I like picking a handful of books and highlighting their contents, instead of listing all of them by title only. I admit, though, the prospect of a list of titles that I could easily standardize across all books is tempting. I may yet go that route.

Atticus allows you to import templates for front/back matter. So if you always have the same Author Bio or the same Also By or whatever, you can write it once and import it to any new books. You can also update it once and tell Atticus to update it in all books, which is pretty nice if you’re doing something like the above-mentioned “list of all your books in the Also by”.

Atticus’s intention is to make a consistent epub across a variety of contemporary, popular platforms. It has previews of what your book should look like on a number of different devices from Amazon/Apple/B&N/Kobo/etc.

But being who I am, my favorite e-reader is Google Play Books (it has a great night mode) for my 6-year-old Android phone. So I imported my new e-pub to Google Play Books, and went “huh, the space between lines is excessive, but it’s otherwise fine.” Next I took a look at it in the other e-reader I already had installed, which was an old copy of B&N’s Nook for Desktop. Where it was spaced normally, but the chapter titles were in the same font as the text and squashed right next to it.

I asked Atticus support about these issues. Atticus support answered promptly. They looked into it, could not find issues on their end, and gently suggested that perhaps the epub would perform better in an e-reader used by more than 0.01% of the reading population.

I mean, okay, fair.

I tested it in the Kindle Previewer, where it looked great. Alinsa tested it on two of her devices. While it had a few oddities on those, they were very minor. In all cases, the text was readable and looked fine overall.

On my first read-through, I found only one formatting error that I could possibly construe as Atticus’s fault: one instance of * had not been converted to an ornamental break. This seemed to be because it was at the bottom of a page in MS Word, and it didn’t have a blank line below it like all the other section breaks. I adjusted it in MS Word and reuploaded (because I had to fix a bunch of other formatting things that were my fault and easier to do in MS Word, like turning three periods into an ellipsis and using em-dashes instead of en-dashes where appropriate).

Demon’s Alliance contains four pieces of correspondence, which posed special challenges to formatting. On my first pass, I forgot to do anything with them in Atticus, and they were just several paragraphs of italicized text.

On subsequent passes, I selected each of the blocks of text with correspondence, marked it as “block quote”, and took a look at the result.

On Google Play Books (where the line height was already high), they looked fine: all of the correspondence text was uniformly indented, with paragraphs separated by a blank line instead of being individually indented. This is how Alinsa formatted the correspondence in other books, so I was happy with it.

I did notice that it had some blank lines between places where I didn’t want blank lines, like between the date and the greeting line. I dug around in Atticus and discovered I could replace the “hard breaks” (enter key) between those lines with “soft breaks” (ctrl-enter) and that would eliminate the blank line. Perfect!

Then I looked at it in other e-readers and in the pdf for the print version. Both Kindle and the print version had enormous amounts of space between each paragraph, like three blank lines instead of one. What. Why.

At this point I contacted Atticus support again. They recommended that I make the block quotes for each piece of correspondence into a “single block quote” instead of “multiple block quotes”. I inferred from this that when you select several consecutive paragraphs and tell Atticus to turn them into a block quote, it defaults to making each paragraph into a separate block quote. To make them one block quote, I combined each paragraph on each letter and then separated them again with two soft breaks (ctrl-enter twice). This seemed clunky? I have asked if this is how it’s supposed to work or if there’s an easy way that I overlooked, but haven’t heard back yet.

In any case, it worked. Yay!

I should note that editing text in Atticus, as a general matter, is easy and intuitive. So, for example, when I need to fix a typo or something I can just fix it in Atticus. However, Atticus does not, so far as I can tell, have a find-and-replace function, which surprised me.

Another thing I spent some time on was making a custom section break for my book in ArtRage, just because I could. I haven’t fussed about section breaks in ages. It was fun to do so again. (This was by no means required; Atticus had several different built-in ornamental breaks to choose from if I didn’t want to make my own).

All told, I spent several hours working on the layout in one fashion or another (not counting time spent on the final read-through). Some of this was spent learning to use Atticus. Most of it felt more like time spent learning what a published book is supposed to look like when you use formatting in a normal, consistent way instead of writing in several different products, each with their own distinctive styles. Plus a chunk of time assembling front/back matter text, which I had to do even when Alinsa did all the formatting stuff for me.

Overall, I feel like Atticus did its job well and that the next book I format in it will be pretty quick. I am pleased by its ease-of-use. Yes, I stumbled a few times, but I didn’t need to tear into the epub or learn code to fix issues. I am delighted by the response time from Atticus support -- when I email with an issue, they’ve responded within hours. Including the email I sent at 9PM CDT on a Friday.

As I said, I haven’t used anything else, so I don’t know how it compares. Based on what I’ve heard, I suspect the Atticus experience is similar to Vellum. I doubt Vellum would have saved me from my own formatting inconsistencies either. (Alinsa would have, tho. Best wuff. ♥) I am happy with the product and look forward to putting everything I learned to use when I layout Angel’s Grace. (Soooooon.)

Non-Player Character* is a charming, low-stakes, gamelit portal fantasy.

Back when V ran the Kickstarter for this book, I read the first three sample chapters and instantly wanted to read the rest.

It's rare for me to be hooked on a book from the start anymore, but Non-Player Character resonated with me. The main character and narrator, Tar, is autistic with an anxiety disorder, non-binary, fat, asexual, self-deprecating, snarky, and 100% delightful. They are drained by their day job, hide in their room playing video games, and are exhausted by social events. SO RELATABLE.

While Tar does resort to self-deprecation, it's humorous and gentle, rather than harsh or cruel. Tar is often frustrated by their difficulties in interacting with the world, but for the most part this is presented as "ugh SO DIFFICULT" rather than "this is why I suck and/or the world sucks." It's not about judging things as Right or Wrong, it's about coping. 

Tar's friends likewise represent a mix of identies and intersectionality: nonbinary, trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, aromantic, autistic, ADHD, disabled, Black, White, probably more that I'm forgetting. And it all flows naturally: of course these queer, neurodiverse people will be drawn to and befriend other queer, neurodiverse people. They're all gamer nerds, too, even the one who feigns disdain for gamer nerds. 

There are a lot of fun little touches. One of the characters, Pauline, has chronic pain and uses a motorized wheelchair on Earth. Pauline's wheelchair doesn't come with them to the fantasy world, so she searches for a new mobility aid. She ends up with a hexclimber, a six-legged one-person vehicle that can negotiate every kind of terrain. It's pretty great. 

And I enjoyed that the narrative centered on coping mechanisms and accommodation, rather than cures. (This is not to say that there's something wrong with stories about people seeking and receiving cures; they're just a lot more common.)

The first several chapters of Non-Player Character take place on Earth, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this part of the novel. The scene of Tar doing their day job as a guide at a tiny museum was especially funny. But the entire book is great: lots of heart and humor, full of wonder and magic. Highly recommended!

• Also available at other stores, see Corva's page for the list.

Many years ago, back in the 80s and 90s, much of my free time was spent on single-player computer games. They rivaled reading as my favorite pastime. As the web rose, I spent less time on them. Most of my game-playing switched to games I played with friends. Occasionally, I’d immerse myself in new iterations of Civilization, but my biggest solo gameplay activity in the last few years has been phone games: Pokemon GO!, Love Nikki and Time Princess. (These are all online-only games with a slight multiplayer component, but the vast majority of gameplay is solo.)

But I kept thinking “single-player games are fun!” To the degree that, when a KS for a neat computer game would come to my attention, I sometimes backed it. By July 2021, I had backed 4 different video games, 3 of which had delivered between 1 and 8 years previously, and none of which had I played, or even installed.

(I have a terrible record of making use of anything I back on Kickstarter, but that’s another entry.)

On August 10, the fourth game delivered: Boyfriend Dungeon. I was actually still looking forward to playing Boyfriend Dungeon. A few days later, I not only fetched the Steam key reserved for me, but I added it to my Steam account, installed the game, and then -- amazing! -- I started playing it.

Boyfriend Dungeon is a dating sim crossed with a dungeon stomp. You play as an individual who’s never dated before. You are visiting Verona Beach for the summer, where you sublet an apartment from your cousin. A dungeon has recently taken over the local mall, and it happens that a bunch of people can turn into weapons. The hot new thing is to meet up with a weapon and then go into the dungeon with said weapon and fight monsters.

The game just rolls with its wild premise. “Sometimes people turn into weapons and sometimes your mall turns out to be a dungeon full of old communications tech that’s trying to kill you, you know, these things happen.” No, I don’t know, and these things do not happen, but I’m glad to see that we’re sidestepping the tropes of “pretending none of this is going on” or “the government intervenes to cordon off the dungeon-mall and puts all the weapon-people into testing facilities” or whatever.

The game has six weapon-people (three male, one female, two nonbinary) and one weapon-cat (male). There’s some diversity in races/origins here: one African-American, one immigrant from India, one Korean man, and three white people. They are all slender and conventionally attractive. As you fight in the dungeon with one of the weapons, you gain affection with that weapon. Each rank of affection unlocks an encounter/date with that person (or cat). It also unlocks a new ability or a new ability choice (choices of ability are easily altered if you change your mind later).

You choose your pronouns and your appearance at the start of the game, and can change either one at any time. The sprites are androgynous, and you can choose to wear any clothing options available; the appearance of clothing is not affected by the pronouns you choose. I liked these touches and thought they worked pretty well.

All of the weapon-people are protagonist-sexual, as it should be in any dating sim. You can play through the encounters as either romantic or friendly. The same character can max affection with all 6 weapon-people, and play through each encounter as romantic, or none of the encounters as romantic, or just one of them. It doesn’t seem to impact the storylines one way or another.

After you max affection with one weapon, you get a 2x bonus to affection with all other weapons, so that does have the nice effect of reducing grindiness.

I maxed affection with all seven weapons and finished the main storyline. Note: finishing the main storyline ends the game! I recommend either finishing everything you want to do before you start the final storyline encounter (it will be obvious when this will happen) or making a copy of your save file first (the game supports this).

I picked the romantic options when dating the six weapon-people, and the romantic options all imply sexual content, although they’re fade-to-black about it. I found five of the routes pretty satisfying, and the sixth one a bewildering choice for a dating sim. I didn’t explore any of the “let’s be friends” choices with the weapon-people. My impression from the reactions of those who did is that the dates work best as romantic-allosexual. There are no romantic-asexual options, and the friendship options are portrayed as positive but not with the same depth as the romantic-allosexual.

The weapon-cat encounters are pretty much “make friends with a cat”. I found the weapon-cat storyline endearing although I’m not sure why the devs thought this was a good storyline to put in a dating sim. I mean, he’s a cat. He doesn’t talk, he does not interact as a being of human intelligence, and you’re not dating him. I’m not saying I wouldn’t play a “befriend seven different cats with different feline personalities, each of them getting their own distinct storyline” game because I 1000% would. But it was an odd choice when everything else is dating (basically) humans.

The game has a content warning for stalking; I’ll get into this more in the spoilers section below. I have some spoilery issues with the main storyline as well.

I am not much into dungeon-stomps and it took me a while to get the hang of this one well enough to get through it. I ended up repeating a lot of the early levels in the first dungeon several times because it’s what I could handle. Once I figured it out, I think I was somewhat overleveled for the later stuff, so it was pretty easy thereafter.

The final storyline fight was difficult enough that after I beat it once, I reloaded and tried to beat it with a different weapon, and then nope’d out after a few failures.

There is a setting to give you double health or something on those lines; I didn’t have a hard enough time to turn it on. (Though maybe using it would let me beat the boss again with a different weapon). I didn’t see any other difficulty settings.

So I found the combat content a bit grindy and a bit challenging, but it wasn’t much of an issue. And I liked the little break between storyline encounters that stomping around the dungeon provided.

Overall, I had a great time with the game. I appreciated that it was polyam-friendly (if only in harem-style), bisexual-friendly, and had nonbinary rep for both the protag and the love interests. I enjoyed the romances, and I liked the setting and the tone: offbeat and with a sense of humor, but serious enough that I could immerse myself in the world. The main storyline disappointed me in some ways, but not enough to impair my enjoyment of the game.

On to the spoilers! This includes some stuff that I enjoyed figuring out on my own and am glad was not spoiled for me. It also includes details about the content warnings and specifics on what disappointed me. So YMMV on wanting to read it.

I want to point out that I enjoyed this game enough that writing this review makes me want to play through it again. XD According to Steam, I spent 15 hours playing it. I expect someone reasonably good at the dungeon stomp could get through all the content in 10 hours or less.

( Spoilers HOY )

I read another book! Also in a finite amount of time! Just as if I were a person capable of reading books. Weird.

Bonus! This one did not make me sad! So that was nice.

Like Boyfriend Material, Looking for Group is also an M/M romance with a single POV character. LFG centers on two college students who meet while playing “Heroes of Legend”, a thinly-veiled stand-in for World of Warcraft. Much of the story takes place while the protagonist plays HoL, so you hear a lot about the game and detailed play-by-plays of dungeons and raids and the occasional grinding or touring the world.

The sum of my WoW-playing experience is “for three hours on one evening, using a free account.” Despite this, I have significant WoW-adjacent experience: Lut played on and off for several years, including as a member of a raiding guild. Many of my other friends have also played a lot of WoW. And I’ve played various other MMORPGs. Anyway, I found the descriptions of raids, dungeons, tactics, strategies, etc. all intelligible and easy to follow. The end of the book has a glossary, which I got to and thought “oh, this would’ve been useful to know about before I finished the book.” And then I paged through it and realized I had immediately recognized every term in it except for “achi”, which I figured out by context two lines after coming across it and which the narrative revealed explicitly in another six lines or so. (Me: “what the heck is ‘achi’? Oh wait you mean CHEEVO? Is calling achievements ‘achi’ a UK thing? Or a teenager thing?” All the other terms I hadn’t recognized were general UK slang, not gaming-specific, and not covered by the glossary.)

I don't know how the book would work for readers who are not familiar with MMORPGs. I found the MMORPG content believable and authentic, and occasionally tedious to read in much the same way that MMORPGs can get tedious to play. I expect reading it as a non-gamer would be similar to reading a fencing romance when you know nothing about fencing -- ie, it might be deal-breaker because you don't want to deal with all the jargon, or it might be fine because you can let it slide in favor of the story.

The story starts with the narrator meeting a female character in-game, and there’s some “I thought you were a girl IRL” drama and mention of homophobia while the narrator contemplates whether or not he might be bi. So content note for that, but it’s pretty lightweight. Overall, the tenor of the book is optimistic and good-humored.

A few things struck me as implausible; the 19-year-old narrator is the “best-geared tank on the server,” plus going to college, plus maintaining an RL social life where he doesn’t raid on the weekends. And I really feel like playing in the top guild on a server is a bigger time commitment than the author suggests here. Like, this is significantly less time commitment than I had to EverQuest, and I was never an elite player. Also, both he and his love interest have been playing since they were 15-16, and my experience with teen MMO players is that their parents will not let them make the kind of commitment to the game required to become an elite player. On the other hand, this is a fictional MMO so one can posit that it allows skill to elide some of the grindiness of real MMOs. The one that startled me more was a 19 year-old character saying that he spent “most summers” visiting a 45 yo friend in Germany. The friendship is perfectly reasonable; when Lut and I met, one of our close friends on Furry was a teen and about half Lut’s age. But a teen traveling to another country to visit a much older man -- eep. I actually do know people who did this (well, “traveled across the US” rather than to another country, but UK to Germany is pretty similar), so it shouldn’t boggle me that his parents didn’t just go “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND” at the concept. But it does.

Regardless, it was nice to see a book refer to the cross-generational friendships common to the online era as a positive thing, instead of “ew adults creeping on kids.”

Overall, I had a great time with this book and am glad I read it. It was in some ways not as good at "romance" as Boyfriend Material -- it doesn't really have scenes that I found so touching that I want to re-read them, for example. But it's a fun read. Maybe I will even try reading YET ANOTHER book! gasp

Oh hey I finished reading a book! 

It's amazing!

That I finished reading a book, I mean, the book was good but "amazing" would be an overstatement. The Duke Who Didn't is Courtney Milan's newest release, a historical romance about a mixed-race (British & Chinese) English duke, and his Chinese-British love from the working class. Like most Milan romances, the pair is incredibly unlikely -- how do these two even meet, much less fall in love? Milan spends much of the book selling the premise; it takes a lot to establish. I almost gave up on the book early on, after the reveal of one of the devices intended to keep the lovers from resolving the romance too soon. It was a cringe-inducing device and I did not want to spend the rest of the book cringing.

Fortunately, she didn't devote too much of the book to this particular point.  Milan said on Twitter that one of her inspirations was non-Western story structures that don't center around conflict. I would not describe this as a "book without conflict" -- it's got a lot of conflicts between characters, and the standard central conflict that is resolved before the end of the book. But it is atypical of Milan's romances; it doesn't have the Mandatory Third Act Breakup, which I hate*. (I don't care that it's considered mandatory, and very few of my romances use the device.) And overall, it's lower conflict and the stakes do not feel as high as Milan's other romances. 

All in all, I enjoyed it and hope she continues to explore alternative story structures because this was a great change of pace. I'd give it an 8 on my "enjoyment" scale, due to miscellaneous nitpicks.

*To be clear, I hate that it's regarded as mandatory. In some stories, it makes sense and it works. But as a required element, it is incredibly grating.