Chris Bissette's Blog

This is where I put stray thoughts and talk about writing fiction.

I also blog about the books I read and the games I play elsewhere on Bear.

Recent Posts

• 18 May, 2025 The Great Blog Migration

  Ever since I began being Very Online - which was some time in the early 00s - I've always felt this need to compartmentalise everything. My interests are many and varied, and I have my fingers in many pies, and for some reason I've always felt I should put each Thing that I do into its own box where it doesn't touch anything else.

  That's been the case in my use of Bear as well. I came here from Cohost, where I was happy to have everything mixing together, but the second I realised I could have multiple blogs here I made full use of it. I've had a reading blog, and a music blog, and a gaming blog, and this "misc" blog.

  I have no idea what's changed but I realised that it's just silly, so I've begun migrating everything over to one place. My reading blog has the largest number of posts, meaning it's the hardest one to move and therefore that it makes the most sense to use that as my new base. The URL has changed, so if you were following it you'll need to update links, and this blog will no longer be updated. I'll leave everything up for the time being, but all the content here is going to be migrated over there (I've already scraped the posts with a little Python script I wrote, I just need to post them).

  The new URL is https://chrisb.bearblog.dev/. See you there.

• 16 May, 2025 Further Experiments with Zettlr

  After setting up Zettlr on my PC this morning and realising that it may well be my ideal writing environment, I decided that what I really want is to have identical environments on every machine I write on. That means my PC (done), my windows laptop (done), my Linux laptop (not done yet, as I haven’t received the machine yet), and my Chromebook.

  I suspected the Chromebook might be impossible, but after an hour or so of trying different approaches I managed to get it working. For reference I’m using an Acer Chromebook 311 C722 running Version 136.0.7103.102 of ChromeOS. Your mileage may vary.

  Before we start, please bear in mind that I’ve been bulldozing my way through this with zero prior experience or knowledge. If my terminology is weird or if I’m missing something obvious or you can tell I’m getting things wrong, know that I went into this with zero idea what I was doing.

  Flatpak is Unreliable on ChromeOS

  Although Zettlr is available as a Flatpak, ChromeOS’s sandboxed Linux container introduced a bunch of problems. The main issue I encountered seemed to be to do with Zettlr’s Flatpak metadata becoming corrupt, defaulting to start-zettlr (a non-existent command) for reasons I couldn’t diagnose or solve. The result was that I could get Zettlr to launch once, but then it would fail after being closed. This issue persisted even after uninstalling everything and rolling back every change I’d made to the system.

  Missing Dependencies are a Pain

  After failing with the Flatpak version I decided to try the .deb version of Zettlr. Unfortunately this just wouldn’t work with Crostini, with a couple of libraries (libgtk-3.0 and libnss3) unable to be installed. Even after enabling contrib and non-free, key packages remained unavailable or broken, likely because Crostini uses a minimal Debian base with limited access to graphical and 32-bit libraries (and I definitely knew what any of this meant three hours ago, honest).

  The AppImage Works, With A Little Help

  The ARM64 AppImage version of Zettlr can run smoothly, but only after addressing a couple of blockages. (I’m using an ARM-based Chromebook, so I needed the ARM64 version of the AppImage. If your Chromebook has an Intel or AMD processor you’ll probably need the x86_64 version instead).

  The AppImage was looking for a file called libz.so but my system only had a version called libz.so.1. To fix this, I created a shortcut file with the right name that pointed to the version my system actually had. That way, when Zettlr looked for libz.so, it was pointed at the correct version.

  libfuse.so.2 was missing, and fixed by installing libfuse2.

  The biggest issue was that ChromeOS mounts the Linux home folder with a restriction called noexec, which prevents apps being run from that location. This meant that even though I marked the Zettlr AppImage as executable I couldn’t actually launch it.

  To get around this, I moved the AppImage to a system-level folder (/opt/appimages). After updating my launcher to point to the new location, Zettlr launched reliably from the app menu.

  Manual Launcher Creation is Required

  Once it’s working, Zettlr doesn’t appear in the launcher by default. A custom .desktop launcher needs to be placed in ~/.local/share/applications/. I had to create the directory manually to get this to work reliably. I needed to manually set Exec to point to the relocated AppImage and Icon to a local .png file (that last bit is obviously not crucial, but accurate icons are nice to have). The .desktop launcher also needs to be marked as executable, otherwise it will silently fail when you try to launch it, which took me far too long to figure out and is probably obvious to anybody who actually knows what they’re doing.

  Linux Needs To Be Shown Google Drive

  An important part of having identical writing environments on my various machines is working on the same documents and keeping them synced. Initially Zettlr couldn’t see any of my GDrive folders or files, but it’s very straightforward to tell GDrive to share any folders you need with Linux (go to your File Explorer, right click on a folder, click “Share with Linux”). This step probably isn’t important enough to warrant me writing about it, but it was briefly a stumbling point so I’m including it just in case.

  The Result

  It works. That’s all that matters, right? It’s a little slow to load and I haven’t used it for long enough to know whether there are any weird sync issues that arise due to running Zettlr in a Linux environment inside of ChromeOS, but if I do encounter anything like that I’ll update this post to reflect it.

  My next goal is going to be figuring out how to use the same fonts. (I mentioned this in an old post, but the main reason I use lualatex is that it supports calling fonts by name. I believe xelatex does this as well, but I know there was a reason I stuck with lualatex two years ago that I’ve now forgotten.) I expect that I’ll need to install the fonts I use into the Linux container, but that’s going to be a task for another day. I may have issues with ITC Avant Garde Pro, since I think I license that through Adobe, but maybe I just need to bite the bullet and stump up the £20 to buy the single weight I use in these PDFs.

• 16 May, 2025 Updated Markdown Workflow

  A couple of years ago I posted a few things about my experiments using Markdown and Pandoc to produce quick PDFs that share styling with the properly typeset products I release for A Dungeon Game. That workflow hasn't really changed at all over the past two years, and while I'm happy with the results, I've never been particularly pleased with the actual process of making these things. I'm not a coder and I'm not comfortable in the command line, and I've had a sticky note on my monitor for two years containing my (very simple) Pandoc command because I regularly forget it. I also have my LaTeX template duplicated in every single project folder from the past two years, which is just annoying. (In hindsight I should have set up an export folder that I always use, but it's far too late for that now).

  Over the past year or so I've been hunting for a minimal, distraction-free writing solution. I've been looking at things like AlphaSmarts, FreeWrites, the recently-crowdfunded BYOK, etc., but they've all been either out of budget or very hard to get hold of, and really I know in my heart that while I want something with the job of Just Writing and no distractions, I prefer to have a larger screen than any of those devices offer.

  This week I realised that what I want is, effectively, a laptop that will boot immediately into a Markdown editor, that will let me sync files using GDrive (or Dropbox, or whatever), and that will do nothing else at all. And what seemed to be the best option to make that happen was to buy an old laptop and put a very minimal Linux distro on it. Having found a laptop that looked suitable on eBay for a very low price this week, I started researching Markdown editors.

  Over the past year I've been using Deepdwn as my Markdown editor of choice. I like it a lot and it does almost everything I need it to do, but I was still annoyed by how finnicky exporting things can be (plus having to remember to type my YAML header into every new document). I was 90% sure I'd stick with Deepdwn once I get the Linux machine up and running, but yesterday I decided to look into alternatives.

  Enter Zettlr, which has immediately become my editor of choice for the foreseeable future. Super light Markdown editor? Check. Sidebars showing my folders and files so I don't have to navigate away when I'm writing? Check. Actually useful tagging system, unlike Deepdwn? Check.

  And then I read the documentation, and realised it has built-in Pandoc support.

  I've spent this morning figuring out how to modify the export templates to match what I've been doing with Pandoc and LaTeX, and I now have a one-click export for both PDFs and epubs. It was a bit fiddly to get it working exactly as I wanted, so this is me sharing what I've done in case it's useful to anybody else - especially people like me who aren't particularly good at working this stuff out. For reference, my original YAML headers looked like this:

  ---
  title: 
  subtitle: 
  author: 
  mainfont: Roslindale
  sansfont: ITCAvantGardePro-Bold
  classoption: table
  geometry:
  			margin=1in
  papersize: b5
  linkcolor: blue
  output: pdf_document
  ---
  

  I also have a .tex file that I include in the YAML header in my Pandoc command (rather than a full LaTeX template, which I never managed to get working as I would have liked):

  \usepackage{float}
  \let\origfigure\figure
  \let\endorigfigure\endfigure
  \renewenvironment{figure}[1][2] {
      \expandafter\origfigure\expandafter[H]
  } {
      \endorigfigure
  }
  
  \usepackage{sectsty}
  \allsectionsfont{\sffamily\centering}
  \subsectionfont{\sffamily\raggedright}
  \subsubsectionfont{\sffamily\raggedright}
  
  \rowcolors{2}{gray!25}{gray!0}
  

  Then I run this Pandoc command to make my PDFs:

  pandoc -H tex-template.tex InputFile.md -o OutputFile.pdf --pdf-engine=lualatex
  

  As I say, this has been working perfectly for years, it's just a bit of a faff. I also regularly forget to change the output format in my YAML header to epub (or vice versa), which creates some issues with the output.

  The first issue I ran into with Zettlr was that I couldn't create new export templates. The functionality is there - if you go to File > Preferences > Asset Manager you'll see a list of all the export template and a pair of + - buttons that imply you should be able to add and delete new templates, but these did nothing when I clicked them. My solution was to navigate to the folder where they're stored (click "Open defaults folder") then duplicate one of the exiting templates. Then I could jump back into Zettlr to edit it.

  I only needed to make a couple of changes to the default XeLaTeX PDF template to make everything work.

  1. In the line include-in-header: I added the path to my .tex file.
  2. Under variables:I added the information from my YAML header

    papersize: b5 # Possible values: a0-a6, b0-b6, c0-c6,b0j, letter, executive, legal
    mainfont: Roslindale
    sansfont: ITCAvantGardePro-Bold
    classoption: table
    geometry: margin=1in
    linkcolor: blue
  

  My YAML header (which I have set up as a snippet in Zettlr, so I can automatically insert it into every document) now looks like this:

  ---
  title:
  subtitle:
  author:
  ---
  

  Then I set up an export template for reflowable epubs, too. It's always bothered me that I have to edit my YAML header for epubs, both to change the output format and to strip out the font information (since the whole point of epubs is that readers can choose their own fonts). I made a new Export Defaults File in Zettlr, copying and pasting a pre-existing one again as above and simply deleting everything in it before replacing it with this:

  reader: markdown
  writer: epub
  epub-chapter-level: 1
  toc: true
  toc-depth: 2
  

  And that's it. As of this morning it's all working perfectly and I hopefully never need to type a Pandoc command ever again.

• 14 May, 2025 Write 1 Sub 1

  My writing career has been fairly spotty. I’ve been writing - and trying to sell my writing - since I was a literal child. When I was about 9 years old I wrote a “novel” (I think it was probably around 12,000 words long - impressive for a 9 year old, but not a novel) that I’ve long since lost, which my mum helped me submit to Penguin. Obviously Penguin don’t take unagented submissions, and certainly not from children, but neither of us knew that in the 1990s. We packed a short manuscript into an envelope, wrote a cover letter, and sent it off.

  I wish I still had the letter we received from them a few weeks later, which was a very nice note explaining that you can’t just send a manuscript to a publisher but also expressing not a small amount of joy at seeing a child write a book and try to get it published, and encouraging me to continue. I have no idea what happened to it in the intervening 30 years, and you don’t think about retaining things like that when you’re a kid.

  These days “writer” is my job, though I work in tabletop roleplaying games rather than in fiction. I’ve said this many times over the years but fiction has always been my first love, and it’s always where I saw myself forging a career. I love my job and I’m very grateful that I get to do it, I love roleplaying games and everything that goes into making them, but I still feel the siren song of story.

  The first time I decided to take writing fiction really properly seriously was around 2009 or 2010. I’d found my way onto the Absolute Write forums, I’d joined a local writing group, and I was suddenly surrounded by other people who loved fiction, were working on fiction, were talking about the craft and art of writing fiction. Writing is often an incredibly solitary task - I won’t say “lonely”, because I don’t ever really feel lonely; I like my own company quite a lot - and it was a real game changer to suddenly find this community.

  At the end of 2010 somebody on the Absolute Write forums floated a year-long project called “Write 1 Sub 1”. (A quick Google tells me this was the brainchild of Stephen V Ramey, Simon Kewin, and Milo James Fowler). The idea was to emulate Ray Bradbury, who wrote, edited, and submitted a short story every week for a very, very long time. They wanted to imitate Bradbury, and invited everyone else to join them.

  I gleefully leapt into the project, and it was honestly incredible. Some of the stories I wrote during the few months I managed to keep it up - I still didn’t know about ADHD then, or why I have this habit of jumping with both feet into something only to let it die shortly afterwards once it isn’t new anymore - I wrote some stories that I’m still very proud of, and that I still consider to be among my best work. (Part of that is because shortly after starting this project I simply stopped writing fiction for a very long time, so I wasn’t producing new work that could be better). I came very close to making some really good sales, and in hindsight I know that if I’d stuck with it my career would likely have taken me in a different direction.

  I’ve had brief periods of coming back to fiction over the years, and the last time I decided to start taking my writing really seriously was in 2016 when I got my MA in Creative Writing. That also happens to be the year that I started playing tabletop RPGs again and began writing a blog called Loot The Room, which eventually morphed into my day job. It wasn’t that I dropped off writing again, as I have over the years, but that game writing became my focus and eventually my career.

  And that’s been great, but I still feel the fiction itch. Working towards Loot The Room over the past almost-decade has helped me to create a really healthy writing routine, and it’s also shown me that if I do actually stick with something I can be successful at it.

  This isn’t the first time this year that I’ve blogged about wanting to get back to fiction, of course. Back in February I started writing a novel and was blogging about it, but I had to put it aside because I couldn’t devote the time I needed to it. I had too much day job writing to do, and the way I work - in compressed bursts, starting and finishing a project in a day or two before moving on - doesn’t lend itself to producing a long piece of continuous prose like a novel. That’s a shame, because being a novelist is very much The Goal, but I also am very aware of my own limitations and of how frequently I take on too much and walk the tightrope of burnout. Novels will happen at some point, but this isn’t the time for it.

  But I’ve been writing fiction again, and really enjoying it, in the form of shorts. In the past few months I’ve released a couple of new shorts (The Knight of Rot, a bloody grimdark thing set in the world of Mörk Borg; and The Interview, a reverse murder mystery ‘dark academia’ story) and I think they’re pretty good. I’ve also recently revised a novelette I wrote for the release of The Moss Mother’s Maze back in 2023, What It Is To Burn. It’s much easier for me to carve out the time for these shorter pieces, and so it feels like if I want to get back to taking fiction seriously this is the way to go.

  Recently I’ve also been hanging out in the New Edge Sword & Sorcery Discord, which has a really great community of writers in it, and I’ve remembered how nice it is to talk about craft - and how much it makes me excited to sit down and work on fiction.

  Which brings me back to Write 1 Sub 1. I can’t commit to a story a week as I did in 2010, but I can at least commit to writing - and submitting, which is the important part - a story a month. I’ll do some blogging about it as I go along, too, about what I’m working on, anything I discover about my process, all that fun stuff. And maybe I’ll post some fiction, too, though my goal is going to be trying to sell things to magazines. But I can look at some of my old, unsold work, and see if there’s anything to learn from that.

  And with that all said I’m now going to stop blogging, and go and work on a story.

• 05 Apr, 2025 Writing A Novel - Day Whatever

  So these blogs died off quickly, didn’t they? The reason for that - which I think is likely quite obvious - is that progress on the novel stalled.

  Partly that was because I missed a couple of days, and ADHD and habit-forming are the worst of enemies. The further it gets from the last time you did something, the harder it becomes to pick it back up. And that’s a shame, because I think this could be a good novel.

  But just because I haven’t been writing the novel doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing fiction, and I’m looking at this as a silver lining and as something of a win. In the past month I’ve written about 30k words of new fiction. None of it was on the novel, of course, but I think a lot of it is good. I’ve written a Mork Borg short story, and two “dark academia” shorts, as well as a bunch of other stories that I’ve got out on submission at various places. And that feels good. It feels like winning.

  Novels are still what I want to do, but I think I’m going to have to continue figuring out how to work on an extended piece of writing like that with the brain that I’ve got. Mentally I’m very much an “all or nothing” person. I often want to be able to sit down and work on something at the exclusion of everything else. My brain wants to start something, work at it, and finish it. Multi-tasking and jumping between projects is very difficult for me. And that makes writing a novel alongside all of my other writing and creative work a difficult prospect.

  I’ve just had a relatively successful crowdfunder that’s going to give me a couple of months of breathing room where I don’t have to be nose to the grindstone all the time because I’m worried about paying my bills, and I’m wondering if I can carve out two or three weeks in that time to make the novel my sole focus. I’ll need to assess my situation financially when the money lands in my account, because I have to balance paying off debts with making the money cover my bills. If I pay off a full credit card I might only have a month of expenses left over, at which point I’m back to the grind again. But also I’ll have one less credit card to worry about, which will be a relief.

  We’ll see what happens, I suppose. In an ideal world I’d have the money to go away somewhere for a weekend or even a full week, with the sole purpose of getting “off grid” and just writing every day. I’d love to do an Arvon Foundation retreat or go and do a residency at Gladstone’s Library or something similar. I could obviously just book myself into an AirBnB somewhere remote and spend the week writing, too, which might cost about the same as either of those things. Hell, I could just get a tent and go and camp in a field somewhere in Wales for a week, though that’s less exciting. These are all possibilities, though.

  This is a lot of words to say that my goal of getting back into a good writing habit has been successful but my goal of writing a novel has not, but that’s fine. The worst thing I can do is beat myself up over it. What I need to focus on is creating some conditions (mainly financial) in which I’m able to actually prioritise that specific kind of creative work over the sort of creative work that pays the bills, for a good enough chunk of time that my brain can look at the project and say, “yes, I am going to finish this”.

  I’ll report back in a couple of weeks when I know what my financial situation is looking like.

• 13 Mar, 2025 Blood In The Margins

  I don't actually know if anybody is reading this blog regularly, because I don't look at analytics. Regardless, my new game Blood In The Margins just went live on BackerKit and is fully funded. So that's something. If you're reading and you feel like checking it out, I'd appreciate it.

  Novel progress has stalled due to prepping for this launch and going to my uncle's funeral today, but that's fine. The main goal was to force myself to write every day and, aside from today (for obvious reasons), that habit is now well and truly in place. So I'll get back to it tomorrow, and all will be well.

• 10 Mar, 2025 Monday

  Another day of no words on the novel, because I wrote a 4,500 words story to go with the game I'm launching on Thursday. Part of the problem of being a full time writer is that writing for pleasure uses the same muscles as your job, and sometimes it's just not possible to do both. Today was one of those days (though maybe I'll try and get 20 minutes of the novel done before bed, just to touch it).

  This week in general might be tough to find time to write. As well as the game launch I've got a funeral to go to, and work I need to finish for a gallery show that's opening next week. But I figure that if I at least write for 20 minutes each day, that's better than not writing at all.

  I think I've convinced myself to knock some words out before bed.

• 09 Mar, 2025 Writing A Novel - It's Sunday

  I woke up at 6:30 this morning and decided to fit some writing in before my partner woke up. I aimed to do four 20 minute Pomodoros. What I actually did was one 20 minute session and one 40 minute session, writing a little over 2,000 words in that time.

  This is now chapter two, introducing a new POV character and developing some of the world. It's hard to talk about my aims for the chapters without talking about the actual plot of the novel and I don't want to do that, because talking about "what it's about" always scratches the same dopamine itch as actually writing the thing for me. It feels like having done the writing without doing the writing, and I want to avoid that.

  I aimed for this chapter to be 2k words total and it will likely be closer to 4k, but I also aimed for the opening chapter to be 3k and ended up with 6k. I'm hoping that as I get further into this and become more comfortable with these characters that I'll be able to keep the word count down. Otherwise, I'm going to have a big job ahead of me when the draft is done and it's time to edit down to size. But that's fine, I enjoy aggressive cutting in edits, and it's a nice problem to be able to look forward to because it will mean I've actually written the book.

• 08 Mar, 2025 Writing A Novel - Saturday Sessions

  I hoped to get a few hours done this morning but time got away from me, and so I was only able to fit one set of three Pomodoros in. Still, I made good progress, and I’m happy that I was able to make the time for it.

  I hoped to finish this morning’s session by wrapping up chapter one. It’s currently sitting at 6,230 words, double the projected 3,000, and it’s either going to get bigger or I’m going to introduce a new chapter between this and the expected Chapter 2, because there’s still one scene I need to write to introduce the antagonist. (I say this, but looking at my outline I might be able to roll this scene into Chapter 3 instead. In which case, that means Chapter 1 is complete.)

  My Pomodoros were a mixed bag. They were all 20 minutes long, producing 767, 400, and 709 words respectively. That second one has a lower word count because I had to pause to name a few characters who showed up in the course of writing. They’re both minor characters who I really should have known I needed to name when I was planning, since they’ll both show up again, but they have names now and so it’s no longer a problem. And even though I only got 400 words out in that 20 minute block I think they’re pretty good words, and I’m not upset about an 1,800 word session on a Saturday morning.

  That’s basically all I have to report today. Good, steady progress, and the pre-writing journalling definitely helped me reorient myself in the story after taking a day off from writing it yesterday.

• 07 Mar, 2025 Writing A Novel - Oops No Words

  This post is really just to keep myself honest and also make sure that I touch this project in some way everyday even if I didn't actively work on the writing.

  Without going into all the boring details of my life, I didn't write any of the novel today. I did, however, write a 4000-ish word short story that I'm pretty happy with. It's tonally not worlds away from the novel, and so while I didn't actually work on the novel, I feel like playing in the genre still keeps my head in the game a little bit. That story was written for a Mork Borg jam on itch and so I've published it here. I also polished up another story I wrote earlier in the week and submitted it somewhere. As with every time I've ever submitted fiction to a magazine, I fully expected to get rejected. But that's fine, that's all part of the process. It's nice to feel like I'm making an effort of fiction again.

  Tomorrow is Saturday, which means I can probably give myself more than just an hour of writing time. My partner always goes for a run first thing in the morning and then is planning to be out in the early afternoon. So I might try and get three sets of pomodoros done and see how many words I can get down while I have the house to myself.