I published my first short novel, and it is on Github | Hacker News Reader

I published my first short novel, and it is on Github

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20 pointsalbanlv5 comments

Imagine if LOTR was on github...

I like the idea of modularization in fiction. This already happens in fan fiction, but you have to extract most of the parts yourself (I think?)

It would be really useful in SF/Fantasy novels where you have to build out lots of worlds, characters and miscellaneous details like languages, landscapes and history.

If you could "borrow" a lot of the structures that are in a Creative Commons license and use them in your story, you could focus on the parts that are important to you, and let others focus on what works for them.

Artists could come in, draw characters. Cartographers could make maps. App developers could make interactive features. Linguists could make fictional languages.

It reminds me of Tube, that aims to create an animation movie with content and data cc licensed. The idea is to make elements (modules) such as a characters, moves, light patterns, easily reusable. http://urchn.org/

I think writing a novel on Github is a fascinating idea, if people can read your revision history and see the entire evolution of the text.

Silvia Hartmann is exploring the idea of allowing the reader to follow the creation of a novel by writing on Google Docs. you can follow her on real time here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AwxZlO1uVnFFKh_NWAlZ78oK... With Github we can add to this the revision history plus branching, forking... I think we can go beyond the idea of a novel as a unique finished version written by a unique author. Novels could be as open source software : you don't have a finished product, but versions, and you don't have an author, but several contributors.

Back when I used vim for fiction writing, I also used to use mercurial (this was several years ago so git on windows wasn't worth the hassle) so that I could track history as well as so I could back it up by keeping my repo on another computer. It was an interesting process. I should probably see if git or mercurial diffs work on rtfs now that I use scrivener, since part of the appeal is being able to track changes.

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