monkeytale 0.2.1

An opinionated markup language for composing, documenting, and visualizing a novel.

---

output: word_document

Monkeytale v0.2.1

"The book is a program." - Matthew Butterick

Monkeytale is a markup language for documenting and composing a story world and its novels within flat files. I am building this language to meet my opinionated needs for improving insights into my own writing.

Design Principles

• Don't opine. Mirror what is, but is not seen.
• Story structure lives within the writing and not file and folder structure
• Only flat files with version control and durability of access
• Simple syntax
• No configuration

Planned Functionality

• Compose one or multiple narratives from story components
• Navigate to any named story component
• Execute from continuous integration server
• Derive story structure knowledge from story components and their content
• Provide plugin mount point for generation of documents from story structure extracted by Monkeytale

Dismissed Functionality

• Advice on how to improve or correct the writing
• Typography and formatting, other than emphasis (italics)
• Tables of content and indexing
• Project management and goal tracking (unless hard deadlines ever become a reality for me)
• Stuff other folks have done better

Development Progress

Monkeytale is developed in spare time and uses Semantic Versioning and Semantic Release to track its, equally spare, progress.

As per Semantic Versioning: "Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable."

Check the change log for the latest updates.

Decisions

• Python 3 will be the programming language for Monkeytale and any plugins that folks might want to build
• Visual Studio Code (VSCode) will be the text editor of choice
• GruntFuggly's ToDoTree extension for VS Code will be used to support navigation
• Markdown Preview Enhanced extension for Markdown and Mermaid diagram display and conversion to docx using PanDoc and PDF using Safari.
• Github Actions as execution platform
• Use .@ as the file extension to indicate Monkeytale files