Chastity's Chess Challenge

Tag: books

  • How The Chandler Caterpillar Evolved into a Chastity Butterfly

    Chastity’s Journey into a career in writing began in 2013 when she published a book titled “Confessions of a Confused Virgin”. This book project was intended to teach Chastity about the process of self-publishing a book so that she could help her mother, Judena Klebs, publish the books she had written.

    However, the people on Facebook enjoyed Chastity’s different points of view on dating, marriage, and sex. After that, Chastity started blogging on a WordPress blog about whatever she had on her mind at the time. Eventually, these small posts became content for future books she would publish.

    The majority of her writing was a series of conversations she had with a unicorn in a dream. The series remains forever published as “Chandler’s Honesty” because Chandler is her legal name even though she is known by her preferred name of Chastity White Rose. Unlike most transgender people, Chastity does not consider Chandler to be a “dead name” but instead a name of historical importance as she evolves from a caterpillar to a butterfly and yet remains the same person.

    butterfly.png

    Chastity is a simple person who prefers playing Tetris or Chess much more than writing. However, she began a project in Pride month of 2025 with a focus on educating the public about the LGBTQIA+ community that is different than the hype you would hear from mainstream media.

    Chastity graduated with a Creative Writing Degree in July of 2025 after attending Full Sail University as an online student while working full-time at Walmart in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

    Her best paperback books and ebooks can be purchased from Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play books, and many others. These works cover a range of topics, such as opinions on politics or religion, her Journey as an Asexual Transgender woman (Chandler’s Honesty), and even a 100-page book about the board game of Chess (Chastity’s Chess Chapters).

    But beyond writing books and blog posts, Chastity is offering services to help others write and publish their books, blogs, and websites. Those who have a story to tell but who may not be as technologically inclined may benefit from her experience using Kindle Direct Publishing, Draft2Digital, WordPress, and writing content with Markdown and HTML.

    Chastity writes on two main websites that she pays to keep free of ads and distractions.

    You can also follow her author profiles for updates on the latest books she publishes.

  • Technical Writer

    After publishing my first Chess book, Chastity’s Chess Chapters, I have come to realize that what I was accidentally doing is the start of Technical Writing. When I think about the majority of what I have been reading in my lifetime, I discovered it was not story novels. I am much more likely to be reading a book or a PDF manual written for Open Source Software.

    In the process of writing my Chess book, I depended greatly on the Technical Writing of other people. For example

    These three people were extremely influential to what I needed to learn. The Markdown Guide provided me with the knowledge to separate chapters from paragraphs and link to images which I needed to include in my book. It also pointed me to Gabriel’s blog post about using only open source tools to publish a book. His blog post introduced me to Pandoc, which is a perfect complement to using Markdown as described in the Markdown Guide. These 3 unrelated authors of Technical Writing about how to use these Open Source tools all accidentally worked together in helping me include the images in my own book.

    The end result is that my book, Chastity’s Chess Chapters, is a Technical Writing book about how to play the game of Chess, what software and websites can help, and also some about the process of how the book was made. There were a few Pandoc commands included in the book to remind myself how I did the process of making my book files, but also for the purpose of sharing the information to help other authors write whatever books they want and get them published.

    After speaking with Career Coaches Susan Smey and Mary Helen Norris, I am starting to see that a Technical Writer is what I am becoming without even trying. The kind of things that I have been reading and writing have a name. Once you know a name of something, it can be Google searched, and then opportunities are available! I am very excited for what career I may have because of my Full Sail University education and my self taught computer skills.

  • Chastity’s Google Translate Process

    The following steps outline what I did to convert my Chess book I recently published into Spanish through the power of Google Translate. I did this because I have Spanish speaking friends and Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in the United States of America.

    First, I had to take the original ebook in English and convert it into an OpenOffice Document.

    pandoc ChastityChessChapters-ebook.md -o book.odt --reference-doc custom-reference.odt

    Then I saved it as a Microsoft Word docx file from within LibreOffice. This is so Google Translate will accept it as a valid document.

    Then, I had to go to Google Translate and convert the entire document to Spanish.

    The final step was converting this document into an epub for the Spanish ebook.

    pandoc book-spanish.docx -o ebook-spanish.epub -s --metadata title="Capítulos de ajedrez de Chastity" --metadata subtitle="¡El ajedrez no es tan difícil de aprender como te han dicho!" --metadata author="Chastity White Rose"

    When I published it, I did not edit the results at all because I know so little Spanish that if there was something wrong, I would not have a clue how to fix it.

    However, I also changed the text on the cover of the book to the Spanish equivalent of what I had on the English cover. I suspect that my book will provide a much needed resource to Spanish speakers because most books on Chess are written by players who are English, French, and Indian. Since my goal is to promote Chess to people of every kind, it was essential to make a Spanish translation, and perhaps other languages will follow in the future now that I have a working process to translate an entire book very quickly.

    The Spanish version I made can be found on Smashwords and Amazon.

  • Chapter 10: The Making of the Ebook

    In the ebook edition of this book, a few things were modified. First, the links in the table of contents were changed to internal links for easier navigation in the ebook. They no longer point to the blog posts because the idea is that the ebook can be downloaded and read without requiring an internet connection once downloaded.

    In the paperback, the links cannot be clicked because the book is literal paper and ink instead of a computer. However, they are exceptionally helpful to me as the author because it means I can quickly go to the post for that chapter and check to see if there are any new comments! However, I did not want the links to remain the same for the ebook because it is meant to help you jump to the chapter on whatever device you are reading it on.

    Once I read the Pandoc documentation on the rules for linking to existing headings within a document, I used this command to test it as HTML in a web browser.

    pandoc ChastityChessChapters-ebook.md -o ebook.html

    Once I confirmed that the links worked correctly, I then converted to an epub file.

    pandoc ChastityChessChapters-ebook.md -o ebook.epub -s --metadata title="Chastity's Chess Chapters" --metadata subtitle="Chess is not as hard to learn as you have been told!" --metadata author="Chastity White Rose"

    Then I tested the epub by opening it in Calibre to see how it looked. To my surprise, the conversion worked very well.

    These technical details about software and formatting may not mean much to you as the reader, but this is useful information worth sharing for other authors who may have the desire to write a publish a book. They may already even have a manuscript typed up but don’t know how to get it published as a paperback (the original and true form of a book) or an ebook (the modern convenience of reading a book on your phone, iPad, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc).

    The process of publishing my first Chess book has taught me more than I would have ever thought was possible. I hope reading my book has helped you understand why I love Chess. If you are an author who wants some help publishing your book, I can also probably guide you with a few tools and tricks I have learned.

    My number one tip I would like to give authors right now is to publish an ebook through Draft2Digital. If you can write a book and produce a high quality epub file, you can expect that it will look pretty much the same when you publish it through Draft2Digital. This book you are reading is available on the Apple Books store, the Kobo Books store, Barnes and Noble, and some lesser known online book stores that I hadn’t heard about before joining Draft2Digital. This service is the fastest way I know of to get an ebook available in as many places as possible.

    However, the best part of this is that the books you publish through Draft2Digital are also available on Smashwords. Smashwords is particularly good because if you buy a book there, you can download the epub and then load it into whichever ebook reading application you like. This way you are not locked into only one vendor and can freely read the same book if you change from using Kindle to Kobo, Nook, or Apple Books.

    For example, this ebook is available on Smashwords in both English and Spanish.

    My Chess Books on Smashwords

    Chastity’s Chess Chapters

    Capítulos de ajedrez de Chastity

    My final statement on this matter is that I still think original paperback books are superior to electronic books, but my goal is to make my books available to people who also prefer reading ebooks. It is also possible to update ebooks faster than paperbacks because there is no printing cost. Therefore the ebook may have the latest changes and corrections before the paperback does.

    Please do contact me with any questions, comments, corrections, or Chess Challenges! My email address and website are below.

    chastitywhiterose@gmail.com

    https://chastitychesschallenge.com

    Where to buy the paperback and ebook edition of Chastity’s Chess Chapters

  • Chapter 9: The Making of the Paperback

    Because this Chess book was originally written in Markdown and posted as a series of chapters to my WordPress blog, it did not have any concept of pages or margins because this is not needed to view it on the web. Making a paper book, on the other hand, is different because a physical book is a real physical object of a certain width and height. Some adjustments were needed to submit it to Kindle Direct Publishing.

    Therefore, I came up with a process to convert the text into a form that Amazon would accept for an 8.5-inch by 11-inch size book. The following are the exact steps I used with a combination of Pandoc and LibreOffice

    1. I created the default odt file that Pandoc uses for style reference. This command came straight from the Pandoc documentation.

    pandoc -o custom-reference.odt --print-default-data-file reference.odt

    1. I opened the custom-reference.odt file in LibreOffice and modified the left and right page margins to 0.5 for left and right. The images are exactly 7.5 inches wide, so this makes them perfectly centered to fit within the width margins of a page that is 8.5×11 inches. The top and bottom margins are not quite as important, but I set them to 0.5 for consistency.

    2. I also changed the style of “Heading 1” to automatically include a page break before the heading so that each chapter would start on a new page.

    3. Finally, I used the reference doc after modification as an input when making a new odt conversion of the book.

    pandoc ChastityChessChapters.md -o book.odt --reference-doc custom-reference.odt

    This file should look good enough to export directly as a PDF in LibreOffice. Although this may seem overly complicated, this process is more useful than you might expect. For one, it bypasses the use of “Industry Standard” tools like Microsoft Word that most writers think they need. Pandoc and LibreOffice are the only two software programs you need to create good-looking documents from Markdown files.

    However, this process is unnecessary for most books that contain only text. It was precisely because my Chess book had a lot of pictures that I used Markdown. I used this method because it allowed better control of the images than I could do in LibreOffice alone.

    I would also like to mention that several note-taking apps were useful to me as I was writing the book. Below are my top 3 favorite programs out of the many I installed and tried out.

    All 3 of those apps are useful for their ability to preview the output of what the source Markdown code will look like. For Mobile devices, Joplin and Simplenote are the best. For a PC with Windows, Mac, or Linux, ghostwriter is especially helpful because it works directly with plain text files on your system just like Notepad does, but it also allows a preview just like Joplin and Simplenote do. Testing the images was essential for making sure my pictures were linked correctly!

    In case you were wondering, all of the artwork was made using the program Inkscape. The Chess, Shogi, and Xiangqi pieces are either under a GPL or Public Domain license and came from open-source projects like lichess, lishogi and pychess.

    More copies of this book in paperback form can be purchased here on Amazon.

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F44DG4XD

    You can buy the paperback edition of Chastity’s Chess Chapters or you can continue reading it for free on this blog.

    Chapter 10: The Making of the Ebook

  • Chess and Solitaire

    Could there be a connection between Chess and Solitaire? I have never written about this before, but I was obsessed with Solitaire in my teen years. At first it was Klondike, Spider, and Freecell because they were included on Windows XP.

    When I switched to Linux, I looked for open-source versions of it. The PySol Fan Club Edition had the largest collection of Solitaire games I have ever seen.

    But you might be wondering what this has to do with Chess. At the same time that I was playing Solitaire, I was also playing Chess a lot. When I discovered PySol, I was so into the cards that I bought a physical deck and started playing solitaire games and trying to invent my own.

    The fact that I got this far into Solitaire is evidence of my tendency to completely hyper-focus on a special interest. I was even designing new playing cards by editing the SVG files included in PySol. Ironically, this is the only game I designed art for besides Chess.

    But what reminded me of Solitaire recently was actually Raid Shadow Legends. They added Alice from Alice in Wonderland to the game, except they turned her into a Warrior Goth Girl with the Vorpal Sword and the most incredible outfit, which contains the chessboard and the card suits, from the standard playing card decks.

    Both playing cards and Chess are part of the Alice in Wonderland books and their many spinoffs and adaptations. Much like Alice, I, too, am a dreamer who visits a strange place. I have referenced this in some of my blog posts and songs. I have my version of Wonderland.

    I don’t know why but as I look at the chessboard and the designs on the playing cards, I can feel the power of these ancient symbols used for many games. Every piece, card, and rule has its history of how it came to be what it is today. Perhaps this is why people like me have board and card games as special interests and never seem to get tired of it. Some things have become famous all over the world. I wrote something about Alice after I saw her in Raid Shadow Legends. Once again, I had a moment upon seeing the design of her dress that reminded me of the games I love and why they bring me comfort.

    Alice the Wanderer

Alice had no home in the human world. She preferred the nightmares of Wonderland over the nightmares of Earth. She had become stronger than she ever thought possible. She may not be able to win battles on Earth, but she has conquered the battlefield of her mind. She was not sure whether Wonderland was any more or less real than the world that humans called Earth.

She had come to understand that the Mad Hatter was no more mad than she was. As the Cheshire cat had said, we are all mad here. A world of checkerboards and playing cards brought her comfort because it reminded her that life is a game and a game can be won. 

But who sets the rules of the game? Alice was not sure, but she preferred to make her own rules. Alice makes the way and chooses her own path. In any case, it did not matter where she went. Alice was ready for anything, no matter where she was headed. She did not know where she was going, but she would get somewhere if she walked far enough.

  • Chess should end in checkmate

    In this post, I will be sharing something that may be useful to players about the nature and reliability of Chess databases. This is a topic that I am studying deeply as a Chess coach. I will be using the open source program pgn-extract to assist me in sharing some stats about the most well known free database, Caissabase. I downloaded it through En Croissant. I have to say that both of these programs are free and open source. As a rule, I promote free and open source software because I believe that Chess should be free for all and I don’t believe someone needs to spend money on expensive Chess programs for analysis.

    Even in the largest Chess databases, very few games end in a checkmate. Because of this, it is necessary to extract only the ones that do end in checkmate because it is the proper way to win the game. The game ending because somebody ran out of time tells us nothing about the quality of the moves of that game.

    pgn-extract ../BigData/caissabase.pgn -ocheckmates_caissabase.pgn –checkmate

    For example, on my machine, the database called Caissabase is

    3.53 GB (3,791,607,570 bytes)

    After filtering to checkmates only with the previous command, the new size is

    190 MB (199,970,816 bytes)

    The final output of the pgn-extract command above was

    263966 games matched out of 5397923

    The reason I am sharing these stats is because it serves as evidence that most Chess databases suffer from several drawbacks.

    1. Players agree to draws to save time.
    2. Players lose when their clock runs out in time matches, even if they have a completely winning position.
    3. Players simply give up after they have lost their queen and have been known to resign even when there is a chance to win.

    Because of these 3 reasons. I recommend always filtering your reference databases to games ending in checkmates. In fact, aside from the fact that your analysis of games will be more reliable, this method can save a lot of disk space. For this reason, I have replaced Caissabase with the newer copy on my PC because I am sadly running out of space on this laptop. I expect this information will help people save disk space and also to get better data from the databases they use for analyzing games played both by themselves and also the famous Chess masters.