While I am secretly^[1] focused on a new writing project, I’m still trying to get some of my finished writing projects, you know, published. It’s pulling teeth, jousting at windmills, and/or maybe I just suck at writing.^[2] Either way, I prefer to submit to places that are (a) free (because cheap) and (b) on Submittable. I don’t really like Submittable. I liked it better a decade and a half ago when it was called "Submishmash" and, importantly, was free. But it’s convenient to submit to places on Submittable because — for lesser known titles — it signals a certain seriousness (i.e., they’re paying something for it), and because it keeps track of all the submissions for me. It’s not that I’m necessarily averse to keeping track of them myself, but if I don’t have to —

In general I don’t really bother with the cover letter for my submission, not in any real way, because I don’t think that it really does anything. I’ve read at a variety of literary journals and never, not once, had the cover letter any effect on publication. They do usually want a bio though, and so I’ll send that along. But if you use the same bio everywhere…​

For the longest time I’ve just had an alias setup:

This works fine. Very well, in fact. But the thing is that, for various reasons I won’t go into, it might be nice to have a reasonably well-structured and tested Python project pinned to my GitHub Profile,^[3] and we are looking at updating some of our old Python tooling at work, and so I thought I’d take a half a day or so to get back up to speed on uv packaging, typer, and poke at pydantic, although I can’t really say I used hardly any of the useful features of the latter save the very simple validation.

Anyway, I made a tool I’m calling tmplcl ("Template to Clipboard"), and while I eventually want to support string-formatted templates, it’s in good-enough shape that I thought I’d get it up on pypi, so you can now:

Though I’d recommend using uv tool install tmplcl instead.

It’s a very simple app, whose source code you can read here if you would like.

It was a nice thing to chew on a little bit while I slowly get back into the swing of working on this Rust app^[4] I’ve had half-built and have been thinking about for a long time. So I suppose now back to that, back to the aforementioned writing project, and onward into September.^[5]