Novellas with Groff

The writer describes completing two unpublished novellas after a long-standing dislike of creative writing. The first runs about 15,000 words and took more than seven months; the second is about 40,000 words and was written in ten days. The shift began after the writer started reading fiction more regularly, eventually finishing around 30 novels since July 2025. The experience prompted an account of the tools and workflow used to produce the manuscripts, rather than a plan to share the stories themselves.

Both novellas were typeset in groff, a compact, fast system better known for rendering Unix manual pages. A small custom macro package handles chapter titles, paragraph indents, and extra paragraph spacing; A5 PDFs take under two seconds to generate even on an old computer. The technical discussion demonstrates page-number footers and top-of-page spacing using groff traps, then probes how traps interact with buffered text and environments. Experiments show that a trap can insert text as the current line reaches a set position, and that switching environments allows the inserted text to be separated from the flowing prose. The examples also expose unresolved layout questions, including page-size quirks and an absolute-position request that unexpectedly breaks the pending line. The wider workflow includes Vim, text reflow, Git, and preprocessing, alongside reflections on the writing process.