Appendix B

Writing scenes

What you can write in a scene, and how each part of it comes out in a manuscript, an ebook and a printed book. The same rules apply to front and back matter and Story Bible entries, with the few differences at the end of this appendix.

What a scene is on disk

Each scene is a plain text file ending in .md, usually in the book’s manuscript folder. The text is written in Markdown, a way of marking italics, quotations and breaks with ordinary characters, so the file reads naturally in any program. Septangular uses only the parts of Markdown a manuscript needs.

You never have to type the marks yourself: the Format menu, the editor’s right-click menu and the shortcuts in Appendix A write them for you. The editor shows the marks in a fainter colour, with the text they style already in italics or bold.

Fonts, sizes, spacing and margins are never part of the text. Each build configuration sets them, so the same scenes can become a double-spaced manuscript or a typeset paperback (see Chapter 9).

Paragraphs and line breaks

Leave a blank line between paragraphs: press ↩ twice. Lines with no blank line between them belong to the same paragraph, and are joined with a space when the book is built.

Don’t indent paragraphs yourself: the finished book indents each paragraph’s first line as its configuration says. Text indented with a tab or four spaces is read as plain text: it becomes ordinary paragraphs, but any italics or bold in it are left as typed, asterisks and all, and the build warns Indented text was treated as plain paragraphs (indent is applied automatically).

For a line break inside a paragraph, as in a poem, a letter’s sign-off or an address, end the line with a backslash, \. (Two spaces at the end of the line do the same, but you can’t see them.)

Italics and bold

Format → Italic ⌘I and Format → Bold ⌘B write stars. With nothing selected they style the word at the cursor; used again, they take the style off. A selection over several paragraphs is styled paragraph by paragraph. Format → Clear Formatting ⌘\ takes out every star, and every underscore used as a mark, in the selection.

Italics and bold come out as italics and bold in every format: in a PDF manuscript, a Word manuscript, an ebook and a printed book.

Block quotes

A block quote sets a passage apart: a letter, a newspaper cutting, a sign. Start each of its lines with > and a space. Format → Block Quote does this for every line in the selection, or takes it off again.

• For several paragraphs in one quotation, put > on the blank lines between them too. A blank line without > ends the quotation.
• > > puts a quotation inside a quotation.

Scene breaks

A scene break marks a jump in time or place inside a scene. Format → Scene Break ⇧⌘↩ puts a line holding just # after the paragraph you’re in, with a blank line either side. Any of these, alone on a line, is a scene break too:

You don’t need a break between two scenes: Septangular puts one between consecutive scenes of a chapter when it builds the book. A break at the very start or end of a scene is left out, and two breaks in a row count as one.

Splitting a scene at a break uses the break up, and combining two scenes puts a # between them; see Chapter 3.

Comments

Comments are kept in the scene’s text in CriticMarkup, a plain-text standard that other writing programs read too. Edit → Add Comment ⌥⌘M writes the marks for you, and the editor hides them: it highlights the passage, and shows the comment on a card in the margin (see Chapter 3).

• A comment on a passage puts the passage between {== and ==}, with the comment straight after it between {>> and <<}.
• A comment at a spot is just the comment, {>>…<<}, where it belongs. The editor shows it as a small marker.
• A hidden note, anything between <!-- and -->, is the older way of leaving yourself a note, and the way the starting text of a new front or back matter page explains what to write. The editor shows it as a comment at a spot, and changing it on its card keeps it a hidden note. It can sit on a line of its own, run over several lines, or sit in the middle of a sentence.

Comments are never built into any format: the passage stays and the comment goes, and a comment at a spot between two words leaves a single space. They aren’t counted as words, and the Story Bible doesn’t look for names in them, though it does in a commented passage. Edit → Find… does search them. The one exception is the copy you make for an editor, where your comments become Word comments (see Chapter 3). A book made from a Word document or a Scrivener project keeps that document’s comments as comments like these.

A few rules keep comments simple:

• Comments don’t nest: a comment can’t go inside a commented passage, or overlap one.
• A commented passage stays within its paragraph, and so does a comment’s text. Marks that run across a blank line aren’t read as a comment, and come out in the book as typed.
• A passage can’t hold ==}, and a comment can’t hold <<}, because those end them.

Headings

Scenes have no headings. Chapter titles, part titles and the chapter numbers come from the book’s structure (see Appendix D), and each configuration decides how they look.

A line starting with # and a space followed by words, such as # The Crossing, is a heading in Markdown. Septangular leaves it out of the book, and the build warns Heading "The Crossing" ignored: chapter titles come from book.xml. So does a line of text with a line of === or --- directly under it. A line holding nothing but # marks, with no words, is a scene break.

Quotes, dashes and ellipses

Type plain characters; Septangular sets them properly when it builds the book, in every format:

• A quote opens at the start of a paragraph, or after a space, a bracket or a dash; anywhere else it closes. Italics don’t confuse it: "*Persuasion*," he said comes out right.
• An apostrophe at the start of a word, as in ’tis or ’em, comes out as an opening quote, ‘tis. Type the curly apostrophe, ’, there yourself. Curly quotes and real dashes you type are always kept as they are.
• Quotes are curled the English way, whatever the book’s language.
• Your file and the editor keep what you typed; only the finished book changes.
• Titles in the book’s structure (the book’s title, and its parts’ and chapters’) are used exactly as typed, so type curly quotes in them if you want them.
•   is a space that never breaks between lines, as in Mr. Darcy.

What’s left out or simplified

Anything else Markdown can do is either made into plain paragraphs or left out. Where something is changed or dropped, the build says so under Problems on the Publishing page, so nothing goes missing without a word.

A paragraph that begins with a hyphen and a space, as some languages set dialogue, is read as a list item and comes out starting with •. Start it with an em dash instead: type --- or —.

How words are counted

Septangular counts words as a word processor does: a word is any run of characters between spaces that holds at least one letter or digit. Everywhere it shows a count, it counts the same way: the sidebar, the status bar, Statistics, the preview and the finished book.

• Seventy-one is one word, and so is years—long, written without spaces around the dash. #2 is a word; a dash standing alone between spaces isn’t.
• Comments and hidden notes, headings left out of the book, scene breaks and list bullets aren’t counted. Block quotes, and commented passages, are.
• The book’s total counts the scenes in the book. Scenes in the Stash, alternative drafts, front and back matter, Story Bible entries and notes each have counts of their own, but none of them adds to the book’s.
• A build counts only the scenes its configuration includes. A manuscript’s title page rounds that count, as publishers expect: to the nearest 100 words under 10,000, and to the nearest 1,000 from there (“about 85,000 words”).

Front and back matter

The pages before and after the story, such as a copyright page, a dedication and About the Author, are files in the book’s matter folder, opened in the editor like scenes. They’re part of Septangular Publish, and appear only in ebooks and print books, never in manuscripts. Chapter 9 describes adding them. Everything above applies to them, with these differences.

Details filled in

These are replaced when the book is built:

A line whose detail isn’t set, such as ISBN {isbn} before you have an ISBN, is left out altogether, so the page never shows an empty “ISBN”. The new copyright page uses this: fill in the details on the Title Page and they appear. A name in braces that isn’t one of these is left as typed.

Links and pictures

• Links work here: [sign up here](https://example.com/news). Only web addresses (https:// or http://) and email addresses (mailto:) become links; anything else keeps just its words. In an ebook a link can be tapped; a printed book shows its words. The build warns about a link still pointing at example.com, as the newsletter page’s starting text does.
• A picture, such as an author photo, goes on a line of its own: ![Photo of {author}](author-photo.jpg). Put the picture in the same folder as the page’s file. It must be a JPEG or PNG. The words in the brackets describe it for readers who can’t see it. A picture in the middle of a line is left out, with the warning A picture needs a line of its own. In print, a picture is printed at 300 dots per inch, and the build warns when it’s too small to print an inch and a quarter wide.

Headings and layout

• Each kind of page has its heading already: Acknowledgements, About the Author, “Also by” and your name, “Stay in Touch” for the newsletter page, “Read On” before the next book’s chapter, and an other page’s own title. A copyright page, dedication and epigraph have none. As in scenes, # headings in the file are left out.
• On an epigraph page, a paragraph that starts with a dash (type ---) is the quotation’s source, and is set apart from it.
• The notes at the top of a new page, explaining what to write, are hidden notes: the editor shows them as comments, they never appear in the book, and details named in them aren’t filled in.

Story Bible entries

Each Story Bible entry is a Markdown file in the bible folder, in a folder for its category. You write it like a scene, with italics, bold, block quotes and comments. Entries are never built into the book, so lists, links and headings stay just as you typed them.

Two parts of an entry’s file mean something to Septangular:

• Its name is its first line starting with # and a space: # Tobias Venn. Without one, the entry is named after its file. Renaming the entry in Septangular changes this line.
• Its front matter is a short block at the very top of the file, between two lines of three hyphens. It holds the entry’s other names, its pictures and its fields, one to a line, each a name, a colon and a value.

---
aliases: Tobias, Venn, the keeper
Role: Keeper of Skerry Light
Age: 71
pictures: tobias-venn.jpg, tobias-venn-2.jpg
---
# Tobias Venn

Keeper of Skerry Light for thirty-four years.

You don’t need to type any of this: the card above the entry’s text in the Story Bible writes it for you (Chapter 5). The editor hides the front matter, because the card shows it. In another program, a value can also be written as a list, one item to a line starting - ; Septangular reads the items as if they were separated by commas, and writes them that way when the card changes the entry. A field’s value is one line, and a field’s name can’t hold a colon.

Septangular finds the name and the other names in your scenes as whole words, exactly as written, capitals and all: an entry called Will doesn’t match “will”, but “Tobias’s” still counts as Tobias. For someone the story calls by a role, add the lower-case form as another name, as with “the keeper” above. If two entries share a name, the status bar reports it, and the name goes with the first entry. Chapter 5 has the rest.