Sandowrite — Literary Platform
Publishing fiction on a generic blog means fighting templates designed for marketing, not for long-form reading. I built a text-first platform with typography measured for extended sessions and instant load times. The hardest piece: a .docx-to-Markdown converter that lets me write in Word and publish without touching HTML.
The problem
I write horror fiction and needed somewhere to publish it. Generic blogs are built for marketing: wide columns, tight line height, call-to-action cards interrupting every three paragraphs. None of that works for someone who’s going to sit down for twenty minutes with a short story.
What I built
A static Astro platform focused entirely on the text:
- A 65-70 character line measure, where the eye stops getting tired
- 1.8 line height and a type hierarchy designed for long sessions
- Instant load, with no client-side JavaScript on the reading pages
- Every story is a Markdown file, versioned in Git
The hard part
I draft in Word, and converting to Markdown by hand was a tax that ended up
discouraging me from publishing at all. I built a .docx-to-Markdown
converter that preserves italics, scene breaks and Spanish typographic quotes.
The case that gave me the most trouble was telling an emphasis italic apart
from a character’s inner thought: typographically they’re identical in the
.docx, but semantically I wanted them to come out with different tags. I
solved it with a markup convention of my own in the source document.
Result
I publish from Word and the story goes live without touching HTML. The site loads in under a second and the writing workflow stopped having friction.