Every 15 minutes, Flashbake looks at any files that you ask it to check (I have it looking at all my fiction-in-progress, my todo list, my file of useful bits of information, and the completed electronic versions of my recent books), and records any changes made since the last check, annotating them with the current timezone on the system-clock, the weather in that timezone as fetched from Google, and the last three headlines with your by-line under them in your blog’s RSS feed (I’ve been characterizing this as “Where am I, what’s it like there, and what am I thinking about?”). It also records your computer’s uptime. For a future version, I think it’d be fun to have the most recent three songs played by your music player.

The effect of this is to thoroughly — exhaustively — annotate the entire creative process, almost down to the keystroke level. Want to know what day you wrote a particular passage? Flashbake can tell you. Want to know what passage you wrote on a given day? That too. Plus, keeping track of my todo.txt file means that I get a searchable database of all the todo items I’ve ever used, with timestamps for their appearance and erasure.

Wow.  Won’t say much about syncing the weather and all that to one’s drafts (this seems interesting on one level, on another level seems like stuff only interesting to literary scholars a hundred years in the future who are desparately searching for a dissertation topic not already covered) I’ve been using subversion for a little over a year to do something similar.  While Cory doesn’t like having to manually commit changes to the repository, I love this feature and is exactly why I use subversion.  Every time I make some progress on  a draft, I commit it, and write a little note about what I’ve done.  I can then view the log and see all the progress I’ve made on a manuscript.  I can also review where I made big decisions (the other day I made a note on my CCCCs proposal draft about how I swapped some paragraphs around).  If I decide to reverse that decision, I know exactly what version to return to.  Pretty sweet.  Easy on macs and Windows.  If you have dreamhost or another web hosting service with subversion, you can even sync these to the web and have your stuff available on any computer.

And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that’s how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

via DIY: How to write a book – Boing Boing.

Video screencast of a writer discussing their use of OneNote for draft management.  This video underlines my growing dissatisfaction with this program–the writer is essentially overtaken by the binder metaphor, and ends up thinking of it explicitly like a file cabinet.  This is fine if this is useful for you (although SVN, I think, is more useful/easy to use), but I want more from my program.  Am exploring DevonThink and Tinderbox with the new Mac mini in my office, and thinking that I can shlep it back and forth pretty easily if these become mission critical apps.  Just worried about getting distracted by tinkering and not enough content creation.  But then again, tinkering is what I’m studying . . . .

My personal feelings aside, good video representing techne and writing process.