Kagan MacTane (he/him)#WritersCoffeeClub day 1: What’s the greatest benefit you’ve taken from the writing community online?
Just a sense of community. Of knowing that there are loads of other people out there who are writing, who care about reading and the written word.
#WritersCoffeeClub day 3: How do you come up with the titles for your works?
Very badly. I need to get better at titles.
This is made particularly acute by the fact that I'd like to title my chapters, not just my overall novel. I may very well drop that idea, if I can't manage it.
#WritersCoffeeClub day 4: Share a tool of your trade.
I'm being slightly unusual (for a writer) by repurposing a couple of the tools of my professional trade (software development) and using them for writing. Namely, VS Code and Git. VS Code is a code editor, and it doesn't bother with things like fonts, margins, and so on. I'm writing my WIP in Markdown, so I can italicize things, and other than that? I firmly believe that other formatting... 1/3
...is something that writers shouldn't concern themselves with at all, but should leave them to the layout people.
Git is what's called "source control" software, which allows one to "check in" files and data, and then save updates as they're made. And roll back updates. And even make "branches" in the data, so one can try out multiple different changes at once. (Then one can merge them back together, if desired.) 2/3
I think a lot of writers could benefit from being able to branch their WIPs and try out different ideas... unfortunately, the learning curve on Git is notoriously steep and I doubt it would be worth the hassle for most folks. 3/3
Ratsnake Games 🔞@kagan git also only really works for plain-text formats with frequent line breaks in semantically meaningful places - without those, any merge is practically useless.
@ratsnakegames True, but like I said, I'm working in Markdown. And I did say that I don't think writers should be using complicated formatting in their manuscripts.
@kagan Yeah, I write in something Markdown-adjacent myself. The longer your paragraphs are, the more likely it is git merge will spazz out, but it generally works decent-ish.
OTOH: Twine's data format is XML based and plain text so you'd THINK git handles it fine, but Twine packs everything into three lines or so, and worse, reshuffles content on every save.
It's just a caveat I wanted to point out.
clewI remember svn working quite nicely for markdown — with simultaneous reviewers! but I might have done 3 way diffs myself — but that was a while ago.
Probably a) people would laugh at svn now and also b) it’s free and working on most Linux machines.