Noel Rappin Writes Here

I will grant that I am very much not the market here, but if I’m being super nitpicky, there are five things I want from a writing tool for my technical writing: It is okay with proportional fonts. I don’t like my prose to look like code, which I realize is irrational. It should syntax color Markdown, including the backtick for code literals. It doesn’t go berserk when HTML or other symbols are inserted into the Markdown.

Welcome back This week I sort of broke ground on the book that will probably be called Master Space and Time with Ember. Here are some things I know or am reasonably sure about. It’s going to be pretty much a complete rewrite. I mean, some of the cranky rants might still be there, but all the technical content will be new. A new example application, too, though I’m still trying to figure out what that might be.

After last week’s Fantasy novels that made me happy, here’s part two. These are the Science Fiction books that I read in 2014 that made me happy. Again, alphabetical order by title. Also, I’m noticing that my writing-about-books skills are rusty, though I always found it hard to write anything decent about a novel without spoilers. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie This is the sequel to Ancillary Justice, which one all the awards last year.

Every year, I’m determined to write a post about my favorite books of the previous year. Every year, I fail at it, in part, because of my tendency to want to write a 2000 word essay on each one. This year, I’m doing it as part of my new “things that make me happy” blog posts. And I’m splitting it into two parts: fantasy novels this week, and SF novels next week.

Making me happy One of the things I want to do in 2015 is write more. This, like all New Year’s type resolutions, is invariably doomed, but we’ll take it as it comes. I also want to write more about things that aren’t programming, because, well, there are a lot of things that aren’t programming but are still interesting to write about. Combining these ideas, I’m going to try (and probably fail) to do a weeklyish “What’s making me happy this week” blog post based loosely on the similar feature at the end of the NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour Podcast.