Vellum: a list of wants without the tantrum

I have a strange relationship with Vellum. It’s one of the most expensive apps I own (or rather license), and it’s the app that I probably use the least. And yet it’s one of the few apps I wouldn’t be without, because when I do get round to using it, it saves be a bucketload of time and churns out professional quality results without me pulling out what little hair I have.

So for the uninitiated, Vellum is sort of like a word-processor … though not really. You can load a file (.docx, .rtf) into it, or type your book straight in, and Vellum will churn out beautifully formatted ePubs for a handful of mobile platforms such as Apple Books, Amazon Kindle, along with PDFs that be dropped into CreateSpace or Ingram Spark.

Yes, I know that I can do the same thing in Word and Scrivener, but even Scrivener can’t deliver such a clean, well-dressed output without some fiddling afterwards. Vellum will space out your text to make sure all the pages are balanced without leaving those niggling single lines on a page before skipping off to the next chapter.

I’m not a believer in the one-stop-shop kind of an app, but Vellum is so easy to use and so well thought out, I find myself wondering what would it need so I could use it more.

So here’s is my list of wants for Vellum, based on nothing more than my own sense of entitlement (there’s a lot of it about after all).

Continue reading “Vellum: a list of wants without the tantrum”

Short story: Monksworth

So I thought I’d dabble in comedy-horror for a while, so I’m putting together a collection of short stories about a family cursed throughout history. This particular piece tells the story of a chauffeur who comes to work for a member of that family.

Enjoy!

Short story: Cloud

white clouds and blue sky
Photo by Ithalu Dominguez on Pexels.com

This little gem is a COVID-inspired piece I put together during the UK lockdown that wasn’t. It’s a short sci-fi piece that asks the question: what would the country look like if the lockdown was set to go on for a little bit longer …

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