Writing Fiction Using SubEthaEdit

Phil Shapiro writes "The recent blizzard on the East Coast makes for some great collaborative creativity opportunities of various sorts, including group fiction writing using SubEthaEdit. Did you know you can write fiction about collaborative fiction writing using collaborative fiction writing tools? We didn't either." Man, the best fiction I've ever produced is some of the project plans created using SubEtha.

Re:Sorry

[KingDaveRa]

Its a shame there's not a windows/*nix version, or a similar thing using AIM or MSN Messenger. Do similar tools exist and I've never seen them maybe? I'd like to do some online collaborations.

Re:Mac OSX only...

[the_2nd_coming]

like?

and BTW.. SubEtha has been around for years.. prior to the name change 3 years ago they were known as HydraEdit.

Re:Sorry

[Tenebrious1]

Its a shame there's not a windows/*nix version, or a similar thing using AIM or MSN Messenger. Do similar tools exist and I've never seen them maybe? I'd like to do some online collaborations.

Well, there's NetMeeting, which comes with Win2K and XP (and as an install on earlier versions). Text, audio/video conf, whiteboard, app sharing. Not the greatest but it's already installed and it's free.

Re:TextWrangler--too little, too late

[tlhIngan]

What I want to know is when a vi-style interface would be put into SubEthaEdit. (I know the FAQ says vi/etc. can't do this, but I don't see what's wrong with putting a vi-interface on SubEthaEdit then). I'd register SubEthaEdit once implemented!

Surely I can't be the only one with source code littered with ":q" and other stuck vi-isms until we realize the editor doesn't support them...

Re:For those who don't know...

[Space Coyote]

I would like to add that I wish that codemonkeys would port this tool to Linux or start a project of adding support for their software to talk to there software like this because it would d be nice to use it to actually do collaboration over the net.

SubEthaEdit is a Cocoa application, which means porting it for Windows / Linux would require nearly a total re-write depending on how much of it is written in Objective-C. And from my experience with writing Cocoa apps vs. Win / Linux apps, you can get a very feature-rich, polished application up and running much more quickly with Cocoa, thanks to its use of frameworks. So a port to another OS might just seem like too much work for the team they have.

But I would definitely love for more programmers to start using ZeroConf (rendezvous' generic name) on other platforms. It's just a damn neat protocol.

Re:This only solves the technical problem.

[iJames]

A good editor would probably solve that. Novels are usually very personal works of art- I wouldn't want to work with someone who dismisses the few who want to try it as "idiots."

Don't get me wrong, if someone does manage to get good prose fiction out of collaboration I'll applaud. My point was only that it's hard, and finding the right software to do it with is not the hard part. I'd personally find it more convenient comfortable to e-mail drafts back and forth rather than having two people edit the exact same text at the exact same time. One needs to give other people's ideas time to develop a shape before one takes a chisel to them.

I suspect you may be one of the idiots who ruined "Invisible James."

If I understood this, I might be able to respond to it. Are you talking about my Web site? What's ruined about it?

We've been doing it for years at my school

[bigBlackSabbath]

We started using Subethaedit years ago, starting when it it was originally called Hydra. I work in a high school, and we have carts full of iBooks which we bring to classes. I started using Hydra when it first came out, and suggested to the teacher of our Creative Writing class that it may be useful in his class. We've been using it ever since.

We started using it to work on playwriitng. One child does one person's dialog, another takes another character's dialog, while another will do descriptions, and another will edit and correct.

What makes it work is rendezvous. The kids don't need to know ip addresses or hostnames - only usernames. We can setup several groups at once without making it into a major project.

Aside from the obvious benefits, it creates a transparent opportunity for the kids learn about group dynamics and working together in a way not many classroom activities do. Because the program works so simply, the kids focus on the work without thinking about the process of making it work together. There are other ways of accomplishing this, but nothing that's anywhere as simple as Subethaedit. I'm glad to see people are starting to see the usefulness of this approach. I'm amazed it's taken so long.