About

This all starts with a half-finished novel that I had sitting on my Google Drive for the past eight or so years. Every once in a while I’d open it in some flash of inspiration or plain curiosity and go through the same two emotions each time:

1. Excitement at seeing some passages that struck me as particularly good at which point I’d start to think that it was worth finishing
2. Dread at the though of working through and reorganizing this monolithic document of 50,000+ words

There was clearly something of value there, but the thought of trying to make sense of it was overwhelming.

I knew I needed a software solution to help me break this up and do some radical surgery. I wanted something that fit all of the following criteria:

• Modularity: I should be able to break my project up into smaller pieces and move them around easily
• Organization: I should be able to organize my smaller pieces into a structure of sections, chapters, etc.
• Internet connection not required: I shouldn’t need an internet connection to start writing. An online-first platform is distracting at best (checking your Twitter account is only a few clicks away) and disruptive at worst (anyone who’s tried editing a Google doc on a spotty airplane wifi can attest to this)
• Git/Github-friendly: To make this into a coherent novel, I didn’t just need version control, I needed branches and a way to store it in the Cloud

There are a lot of potential solutions out there, most notably Scrivener, which fits requirements 1-3 but not 4, and a bunch that fit 1 and 2 but not 3 or 4.

So I decided to roll my own which brings us to Draft.