I’ve put my latest novel, The Rising, on GitHub. For the non-programmers out there, GitHub is a web based front end for the most popular Open Source code repository. Translated, that means that my novel is now being backed up in a version control system that you can browse from the web.
What was I thinking? Well, a couple of things. First of all, it’s a great way to back up your writing off-site and in the cloud. I already save my files in DropBox. But using a version controlled system is just another way to record my changes while I back it up. Git is a open source program written by Linux Torvalds, that guy who wrote Linux. You may have heard of that Operating System.
Secondly, a side benefit of using GitHub is that the public can check out what you’ve been doing. The file that I commit is actually a text dump of all my notes, synopsis and actual chapters. All of that is combined into one, slightly lumpy, slightly more information than you may need file.
I use the program, Plume Creator for my writing. Plume lets me outline and keep notes on each chapter and each scene that I write. This text dump includes it all in a single file. If you plan on following along as I write, good luck to you. But if anyone wants a record of how I write a novel, this Git repository will have it all. I plan on uploading it every week.
At this time I’m just committing this file manually, but in the future, I’ll be making a python update script.