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.

I've been wrestling for several years now with the idea of writing at least four monographs, two on film directors, and two reacting to works of applied philosophy.

The two reacting to books should be relatively easy. The initial idea for this whole thing began with Jeffrey Tucker's essay "Live Blogging A Book Makes You Smarter". Although I've wavered back and forth on doing it as actual blogging (you may have noticed that consistency in posting is not one of my strengths), keeping a journal of sorts as I react to a book chapter by chapter is well within my capabilities. It still feels pretentious to publish a book, but why the hell not? I've published a hundred or so by other writers.

The two on filmmakers are more daunting, given that I have little academic background, and despite having a coherent thematic approach for each (and that only some analytical writing has been done on either director), I'm more lost at sea for those.

There are two basic problems, and I should ignore both of them.

First, I've never done book-length nonfiction, let alone of an academic nature (and have zero desire to join the academy as it currently exists, frankly). Trying to organize my thoughts on the filmmakers' books feels like intellectual whack-a-mole, where I lay out any kind of an outline, and a voice in my head says "but what about [insert twenty-five things that are tangents, at best, from what I'm trying to say]?" The solution to this is to Just Write.

Second, imposter syndrome. I have no credentials, no outside validation. I'm not dumb, and indeed, know what I'm talking about to such an extent that when I discuss one of my obsessions with someone who does not share them, they tend to be intrigued and interested rather than bored.

The solution to this, also, is to Just Write.

Of course, there is also the issue of free time. I've got my indie editing. And editing for Raconteur Press, two lines of novels. And iktaPOP's public domain pulp. And iktaPOP's public domain line for homeschoolers that I need to start doing. And my own fiction writing. And, and, and.

The filmmakers are Jess Franco and Albert Pyun. The philosophers are Lysander Spooner and Ayn Rand (and the Spooner book will also be published by iktaPOP, partly because there is currently no good ebook edition of it available).

Chapters from any or all of these may get posted here, though once the books are ready for publication, the posts here will go behind the paywall to conform to Amazon's publication requirements.

[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.