At the start of this year I made a decision: I was going to write a book. Not just “I’ve got a book in me” but an actual novel-length, finished thing. Nine months later I had a manuscript, and every step of the way I used free and open-source software.
The core of the writing was in LibreOffice Writer. I split the book into arcs, wrote each one in its own file, and set myself a minimum of 1,000 words a week. LibreOffice’s word count in the corner was my pace-keeper. I’d draft scenes in a scratch file, then paste them into the arc once they were done.
Nextcloud made the whole thing possible because I live between two machines. My home PC never leaves the house, and my travel laptop never comes inside. With Nextcloud syncing everything, I could pick up wherever I left off. Nextcloud Notes was a lifesaver too—if I had a scene idea while out running errands, I could throw it into the notes app and it was waiting for me when I got home.
Editing was a mix of tools. I ran my first full-manuscript edit with the WritingTool plugin in LibreOffice. For cleanup, Notepad++ was great for find-and-replace jobs: stripping double line breaks, fixing quotes, stuff like that. I leaned on autocorrect to catch curly quotes after pasting, then did a second pass chapter by chapter to hunt down tense shifts.
Formatting for stores was its own battle. LibreOffice’s MOBI export left some junk behind, so I cracked the files open in Sigil and fixed CSS issues and duplicate titles. For the cover I shot a photo, layered and blurred it in GIMP, and then laid out the text in LibreOffice Draw.
That toolchain carried me from blank page to finished book. The result is Future Sepsis, my first sci-fi novel. It’s starting to show up on storefronts now if you want to see what a FOSS-powered workflow can produce.