## "Just write," they said, "It doesn't matter what tool you use..."
Writing is the hard part, everything else is just *formatting*. You could scratch your novel into a wall with a rock, or use a modal command line text editor, the point is: *you should be focusing on writing*. Your tool should be a secondary concern.
## ...says the README file trying to sell me on a writing tool...
Right? I'm losing the sale before the customer even drove the car, but Giterary isn't really selling something (it happens to free, open source software, which bring together [other][git], [powerful][markdown], [freely][php] [available][jquery] [tools][showdown]).
So, what does Giterary do as a writing tool? Giterary is a tool that suggests a better way to work, helps you if it can, concentrating on making the hard things easy, and keeping the simple stuff simple. You can *just write* if you want, but it brings together powerful tools that let you manage complexity down the road.
## "[A first novel won’t be as much work as you think. It will be much more. ][reddit]"
Consider the scale of a novel. For the most part, published writing projects weigh in at around ~50,000 to 100,000 words (and often more). They can take years to write, after which they tend to require extensive editing, re-reads, re-writes, and whatever requisite iterations it takes to make a better product.
Now consider a machine with ~50,000 to 100,000 moving parts. A *novel-machine* that takes a human's attention as input and outputs compelling plot, worthwhile characters, and subtlety. As the engineer/author, it's your job to fabricate the machine parts, construct them correctly, and maybe apply a layer of paint. Sure, it works for you the first time you run it, but when your best friend takes a whirl it seizes midway past the second-stage turbine spooling. You walk slowly through the smoldering wreckage. Your friend is alright. Your pride is not. And you forgot to take notes the first time around.
The point is: if *writing* a novel is hard, *maintaining* a novel is complex. The latter of which is overlooked when *just writing* is a primary concern.
**Giterary offers a set of *nice things* to write and maintain a novel**, managing complexity at both ends of the process, and hopefully without you noticing. How does it do this? Well...
## When programmers are lazy, everyone benefits.
Computer programmers look at your machine with 100,000 moving parts and laugh. Software weighs in at **tens of thousands to a few million** lines of source code. They don't even bother to count the words, were there even words to count.
They laugh because they solved the management of that complexity a long time ago. Lo, and they said, *"A hundred people need to work on something with at least a million lines of code. And they should all be able to work at the same time, and be able to detect and communicate their changes efficiently, and maintain detailed histories of their changes, and gracefully solve conflicts, should they arise."* And thus it was so, and they've been improving on this concept ever since.
If your novel were like the programmers' source code, you'd be able to manage your novel with these all-powerful tools of the programmer gods. The thing is, your novel **is** source code, much like its words are part of your *novel-machine*. It's just a matter of *formatting*.
## That's nice. So what does this do, again?
Giterary suggests you write your chapters in Markdown syntax (but you don't absolutely have to). Markdown is a text-based format that lets you do complex formatting by *just writing*, and largely ignoring things like formatting, markup, and tedium. It also extends Markdown's functionality by allowing textual annotations and "wikilinking" between your files, similar to Wikipedia, letting you build a web of references to information you need.
Giterary puts these text-based files into a hierarchical directory structure of your choosing, and manages these files using a Git repository. The Git repository stores all versions of all files, and Giterary wraps around the Git repository to let you easily see information about your files, down to showing you when you swapped out "she said" with "she said, languorously."
The killer feature, though, is Git's ability to act as a distributed database. You can take the entirety of your Giterary instance, clone it to any computer, make changes, and then push them back. Need to work offline on the plane, but submit your changes once you're back in civilization? Not a problem.
*(Side note: It can also do things like show you dictionary word counts, auto-generating tables of contents, dialog highlighting, document partitioning, document collections, auto-saving drafts, etc., and other common word processing features, but those are pretty run-of-the-mill, so you can discover those for yourself.)*
## Nobody has time for that noise, I just want to write. Why would I need that?
Three reasons:
* **You will forget about something, or, forget why you did something.**
I barely remember last week. Yesterday's already fuzzy around the edges. Things I wrote a year ago might as well have been written by a different person, with different hopes and dreams. And while I can't talk to that person, using Giterary will let me see what that stranger did, and if they provided notes, see what they were thinking.
Giterary helps you talk to the past, and leave messages for the future.
* **It may not only ever be *you* making the changes.**
You never thought about **that**, did you, hot shot? Well, yeah, I guess maybe you did. The possibility of multiple authors isn't unheard of, but that pales in comparison to the most common case: you will eventually need to turn your things over to an **editor**.
You *can* submit a massive, monolithic Word document via email and hope *Track Changes* does the job. But what do you do while you're waiting for them to send your document back? What if you're still working on a chapter? How do you maintain which is the "master" copy, and which is for edits? Do you **copy-paste** your edits?edits, like the beasts of the wild?
If you feel shame, that's okay. It means the healing can begin. Giterary provides an intelligent system to manage change, and to do so immediately, letting you maintain a sane workflow for both you and your editors.
* **Unless you're part of the Otaku-Neckbeard-Hacker data integrity enthusiast crowd, you'll probably manage you data badly.**
So, do you write a bit while you're at work on your netbook?
It my seem like information overload, but you can ignore it until you absolutely need it.
## Why would I need to organize my information this way?
* **If everything is a text file, there are no surprises.**
Text is text is text. Files are files are files.
* **You maybe should be doing it anyway...**
*Just saying*. The reason for not dividing your novel out into different files is because eventually you'll have to stitch them back together...
## Supporting the Otaku-Neckbeard-Hacker crowd...
## That's the idea, anyway...
## Technical Bits
### Requirements
### Moving parts
[git]: http://git-scm.com/
[php]: http://php.net/
[markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[jquery]: http://jquery.com
[showdown]: https://github.com/coreyti/showdown
[reddit]: http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/wiki/faq