I chanced to listen to the radio the other day, something I haven't done often in over twenty years. The radio in the car I was driving happened to be tuned to what used to be called an oldies station, but these days is kind of the same mush on every radio station—a blend of stuff from the '70s up to now, with recordings of the same "DJ" everybody probably hears across the country on some stations, because local broadcast radio is basically dead.

But that's a rant for another day.

As I drove, the unmistakable opening notes to a song I remembered fondly from my childhood started, and I thought something like "Man, I loved this, but I was a kid, rarely listened to the words, and can't even remember what the second or third verses might be." So I listened.

Turns out, there was good reason for that. The song doesn't go anywhere. There's the verse, the chorus, repeat, and done. It's literally three great hooks, some "deep" lines that don't add up to anything, and nothing more.

Now, the purpose of the song was to support a movie about a band, Eddie and the Cruisers. The song wasn't important, per se, to the movie except to have something cool, rocking, and distinctive for the band to play. Those hooks, that feel, was what was important, really. But as a song, it falls apart because it's not about anything, and the melody doesn't go anywhere.

In a way, the song is quite good for what it is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a minor hit from the early 1960s, pre-British Invasion. As that, it actually fits some standards of the time. Short. Emotional. Uncomplicated.

But even there, the shortest songs of the era had a feeling of going somewhere. "Stay (Just A Little Bit Longer)" by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs is about a minute and a half, but even though it's static in a storytelling sense (it ends with the same plea that opens it), it has real emotional movement to it. "On the Dark Side" tries to do this with the (wonderful, if brief) sax solo.

This is why the song is a nostalgia piece, not something that new generations discover and embrace as their own, in spite of the cult status of the movie for which it was created.

This is a good thing to remember when writing a story (of any length), too. Yes, you need a great hook, something to grab the reader and make him think "Whoa, that's cool!" And if you can do three great hooks, that's even better. but you need more than just hooks. The story has to be about something, and has to have some kind of movement to it, even if you wind up right back at the beginning.

In August 2024, a new video game was released called Concord. Two weeks later, due to disastrous numbers, Playstation announced the game would be taken down, and all players would be fully refunded.

Why and how the game sucked, which it clearly did, is not important here. What is important is that it is, as far as I can tell, going to vanish from all human knowledge. The game, being an online sort of a thing, will cease to be, or at least, playing it will never be an option for anyone.

Something similar happened a year or two ago when Disney+ cancelled, then removed, the Willow series from its service. They did it for a tax write-off, but what they are doing is removing a creation, however awful, from the sum total of human endeavor.

This is not remotely Disney's first memory hole rodeo. The Song of the South has been locked away in their archives, the copyright renewed for the sole purpose of denying its availability to the public.

This deliberate vanishing of creations bothers me deeply.

Heck, I get grouchy about some pulp magazines from the 1900s, like (for example) issues of Railroad Man's Magazine, apparently not being extant, meaning the world is missing out on early short stories by Johnston McCulley (and possibly even a serialized novel or two by him) and others. I still retain hope that Lon Chaney's film London after Midnight will turn up in an attic somewhere, because all we have are still images, and a loose remake from some years later. The fact that it was apparently not good is beside the point. It existed, and should be preserved. 

But the deliberate removal of a creation from human knowledge is another thing again. Those old pulps, and films, disappeared because of neglect. The idea that something can be disappeared by intention is haunting to me.

And not only to me. There are at least two novels about this idea.

Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions is an excellent book (don't hold Auster's NPR fan club, or his being an Important Author, against it) about a man who becomes obsessed with the life and work of a silent film comedian, Hector Mann, whose work disappeared for decades, until copies of his two-reel comedies began appearing anonymously in the mail to various university archives in the 1980s. His obsession leads him to discover what happened to Mann after his disappearance in 1928, and to learn of the existence of a list of films made, but never released, with tantalizing titles. He even gets to view one of them before... well, before what happens.

I've not read The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and I should correct that. It's another "literary" book that may overcome its pretensions by sheer force of premise. A boy whose father owns a book shop takes him one day to the Cemetary of Forgotten Books, where he discovers a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, and takes it home. It turns out to be the very last copy of that novel that is known to exist, and the author disappeared under mysterious circumstances. (And the implication, which might be wrong, is that the author made the books disappear when he did.)

Clearly, the idea of creative works being destroyed haunts the minds of creators, and not just me. 

There's a bit of a fine line I am willing to draw. I made attempts at being a screenwriter, years ago, and none of my screenplays remains extant. J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, destroys his notes and outlines so that all that remains available for anybody is the final, completed work. (He explicitly does this to make it difficult for academics to be able to impose their theories on his work after he is gone.) So: if there is a single creator, and they are destroying something never released to the world... it still makes me itchy (despite me being guilty of it myself), but I can sort of accept that.

But for a company like Disney to take completed work, released to the world (no matter how disastrously) and then vanish it for a tax write-off, of all things... that I cannot accept.

It would be better to allow the tax write-off, but instead of disappearance or destruction, encourage the company to release the unprofitable creation to the public domain. Would it not be better to release the Willow series on a Blu Ray set (without DRM), marked with a Creative Commons Zero license, and include the score on companion CDs within the set, also marked with the CC0 license, give them the write off, and let anyone who wants to make use of any and all of the assets as they see fit? I say it would. It goes against everything Disney currently stands for, but the law could be rewritten to encourage such an action.

And Concord? There I'm less sure how to go about it, since I'm less well versed in video games and how online, multiplayer games could be preserved and/or released to fans to remix. But I should think a similar thing could be done. Upload the source files to the Archive, maybe, and make the game engine public domain, too. Look at what's been done with the Unreal Engline, for example.

But there has to be a better path than destroying that which has been created. Has to be.

[As promised in the intro post.]

I'm a big believer in plain text. A plain text file will always be readable, no matter the computer hardware, operating system, or what have you. Plain text doesn't carry any hidden metadata, algorithms, or proprietary gotchas. Nobody can forbid you from using plain text, nor render plain text files useless by legal fiat.

If you want to write a novel that can be converted into an ebook ready to sell, you can do that as simply as opening your favorite text editor and writing it. Markdown makes it possible.

Markdown began as a way to convert plain text into HTML, and a syntax for denoting HTML tags in plain text. Having a (very basic) understanding of how HTML works is helpful, but not required until you get to the stage where you are generating ePub files. For today, we'll stick with the very basics.

To begin with, paragraphs are blocks of text, with a line break in between. Simple, just the way you would normally write in plain text.

If you want something italicized, put it between asterisks, *like so*. For bold, two asterisks before and after, **like this**.

If you want a break in the narrative, but not a chapter break, put three asterisks (or more) on their own line, set apart like a paragraph, go down to a new paragraph, and keep writing.

Each chapter can be in its own text file, or can be in the same file if you prefer. Either way, you want it to begin with a header with the chapter number, and maybe with a chapter title underneath that. Markup has six levels of headers, because that's what HTML recognizes. For reasons I will go into in a later post, I recommend level three headers for chapters, and level four for chapter titles. That will end up looking like this:

### Chapter One

#### Title

The number of number (or pound) signs is the level of the header.

If your story includes text within the story, such as a letter or a newspaper story, the easiest way to mark that off is to make the text a blockquote, which you do by including a close-angle bracket (or greater than sign) and a space at the beginning of each paragraph, or the beginning of each line, with blank lines between paragraphs also having the bracket and a space for continuous text.

The easy way would look like this:

> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
> 
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

The easier-to-read but harder-to-type version would look like this:

> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,
> sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore
> magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud
> exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo
> consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in
> voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.
> Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in
> culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
> 
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,
> sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore
> magna aliqua. 

Since I am a nerd, it pleases me that Markdown allows easy notation of em dashes, which is to put in three hyphens: "---". And if you're even more nerdy than me, en dashes are two hyphens: "--".

And that, really, should be all that you need to get going. If you want to include poetry or song in your story, or do typographical shenanigans a la Alfred Bester, things get more complicated, but if you're doing that on your first (or tenth) novel, consider whether or not you are leaning on those things as a crutch.

But if you do want to do more ambitious layout sorts of things, stick around. Next time, I'll tell you about the glorious open source app known as Pandoc, which has extensions to Markdown that make those and other things (like footnotes) possible, and is what I recommend for converting your markdown files into ePub files. And later on, we'll cover another plain text markup syntax called AsciiDoc, which is better suited to nonfiction, since it was designed for creating technical documentation.

And if you think it doesn't sound that useful, or it seems too limited for actual book publishing, go to Amazon and find any iktaPOP Media publication. Every single book (and the number is getting close to a hundred) that I publish has a Markdown source file.