Hello friendly people! I’m busily at work on my Princeton press book (working title: What’s So Great About The Great Books?) It’s going gangbusters. Love the book, having so much fun. Writing this book is so pleasurable it almost feels wrong. I do run into missteps occasionally, but I’m chipping away at it each day. The book is organized dialectically, as an argument with a Great Books skeptic (who is also me), so it doesn’t need a lot of extensive prior planning.

I’m writing the book in Typora! Yeah, that markdown software that I wrote about before! I realized that Scrivener was starting to feel a bit oppressive: too many features, too much interface. Typora doesn’t use a proprietary format, just simple markdown files that can be read by a variety of editors (even the source code is perfectly intelligible). I dunno, might go back to Scrivener, but so far I’m liking the experiment. The markdown format means it’s simple to add headings, emphasis, lists, abbreviation, etc. I’m writing this as one big document, and there’s an outline feature within Typora that lets you jump between sections easily. So who knows?

Of course I also just spent an hour writing custom CSS so that typora wouldn’t add extra white space between lines in the editor, so I’m not sure it’s ultimately a labor-saver. And doing that took up all my extra blog-writing time so c’est la vie.