Go back to the early 2000s. I'm kind of obsessive about data portability, and the lifespan of a novel is closer to 30 years than the 3-5 months typical of busin

Go back to the early 2000s. I'm kind of obsessive about data portability, and the lifespan of a novel is closer to 30 years than the 3-5 months typical of business documents. Alas, I'm selling novels to Big Six publishers who like to chew on a Word file. So ... Writing tool of choice: vim. Markup format: Perl's POD (plain old document) format, because (a) I can mess around with the formatter if I need to (old Perl hand), (b) it can export to a variety of formats, (c) it has the minimum necessary set of directives -- headings, lists, emphasis -- that I need (novels are typographically simple unless you're playing Stupid Layout Tricks, hello Alfred Bester and Samuel Delany) and (d) Markdown didn't exist back then. Version control: a novel with a single author is piss-easy. I used rcs, because it was ubiquitous, easy to understand, and to the extent that I was keeping projects on multiple computers I was fine using rsync to keep a directory tree updated; remember, a novelist working alone has no need for multiple user IDs, no forking of multiple versions, virtually never any need to diff or merge -- just the ability to roll back to a previous point if I took a wrong turn in writing (in other words, undo checkpoints with names). No cloud services, of course. (Dropbox didn't come along for a few years.) Build: makefiles and some homebrew perl scripts FTW. Type "make", check out latest draft and generate HTML, RTF and (eventually, via an external toolchain) Word files I can ship to my editors. Back in those days, copy edits showed up as a bunch of paper print-outs with red ink on them and you mailed them back to production after you added your own chicken scratchings. (If you were smart you scanned/photocopied the pile first, for insurance: this saved my ass on two occasions when CEMs went missing in the post, thank you for nothing, Royal Mail). Page proofs ditto. So I was able to use my homebrew toolchain happily for several years during which I wrote "Singularity Sky", "Iron Sunrise", "Accelerando", "The Atrocity Archives", and the first three Merchant Princes novels using it. Then the publishers began moving to Microsoft Word tracked changes for processing copy-edits, and annotated PDFs for the page proofs, and it was all over bar the shouting; Word tracked changes suck, but trying to check the changes on a large document in a third party word processor like LibreOffice sucks even harder (one sleeper bug that nobody triggered before can cost you a couple of months work), forcing me into Word for the post-writing workflow. And then a Better Way came along for writing books in the shape of Scrivener, for which there is nothing remotely like an open source equivalent and which is well worth the price. Alas. Which is why my open source novel writing days are over. (But if I had to do it again these days? Markdown, Pandoc, and Git, probably with all the fancy Vim plugins I could lay my hands on.)