JeffKirvin.net

In our last installment, I talked about using a hosted Exchange provider, along with a Windows Mobile 5 device, Outlook on the desktop and Outlook Web Access everywhere else, to completely do away with syncing email, appointments, tasks and contacts. Just as IMAP4 does for email alone, hosted Exchange means that for all those data types you make all changes directly to a server omnipresent on the internet and access the changed data from the same source no matter where you might be.

But how do you do that for manuscripts? Let’s be frank about this right up front. Is this kind of “write once, read everywhere” no-sync syncing possible for Word or RTF documents?

Sort of.

I’ve tried several different methods for keeping what I write stored on the network rather than on whatever device I happen to be using, with varying results. Nothing is perfect and nothing has the “fire and forget” simplicity of hosted Exchange. Here’s what I found.

An intriguing strategy I read about on someone else’s blog (and totally don’t remember where now) was to write within tasks themselves. The Note field in an Outlook task is essentially an unlimited plain text field. And since using my GTD methodology necessitates breaking out writing the next article or the next scene of fiction as a next action, why not just write in the task note and then copy and paste into the finished Word document later?

As it turns out, this works for small bites of writing, but less so for anything lengthy. The notes sync automatically just like anything else supported by Exchange. However, I found this cumbersome for two reasons, or really facets of the same reason. At home it worked great. On the go, it was clunky writing inside a task in Pocket Outlook on my 6700 (the default fonts are enormous; great for reading driving directions but horrible for fiction) and at work on my breaks Outlook Web Access only displays the task notes in monospaced type. In the end, I just missed using a real word processor for, well, word processing. I lacked spell check, lacked word count and I’d still have to copy and paste into Word later anyway.

The next thing I tried was just writing the scenes in the bodies of emails to myself. Outlook may be lacking word count, but it has spell check and most of the other writing tools you’d expect in a real word processor. This worked okay, better than writing inside tasks, but quoting starts to get messy if you don’t finish the article or scene in one sitting. So much so that I gave up on this as well.

I thought about Google Docs. This would actually work for me, since I don’t need really sophisticated formatting. However, it’s an AJAX application which makes it still a nonstarter on my Pocket PC (although I hear that IEM is AJAX-enabled in AKU 2.3, due next month).

For a while I was convinced that a web-based drive, accessible from everywhere, would be perfect. I tried several approaches on this, from a WebDAV-enabled folder on JeffKirvin.net to AOL’s XDrive to Microsoft’s Foldershare. Nothing worked as seamlessly on my work PC, home PC and Pocket PC as I wanted. In the end, it just wasn’t worth the effort involved to make it work.

So what did I settle with? A two-headed solution, with reference or background material on one side and actual drafts on the other.

For drafts, I’m working on files in Word or Word Mobile, and then attaching them to emails to dummy email accounts I have set up. I have these set up with Outlook rules to autofile into folders. So here’s how it works. Let’s say I want to work on the latest issue of Unification Chronicles. I open up Outlook/OWA/Messaging and look at the most recent message in the “Unification Chronicles” folder I have under my Inbox. I save the attached Word document to my desktop/storage card and start writing. When I’m done, I send a new email to my Unification Chronicles address and attached the modified file. In the message body, I summarize what I added or changed. Repeat as necessary.

This has two big advantages. One, I get to write in Word, with all the benefits that entails. Two, I have a running log, stored forever in Gmail, of what I changed and when. It’s really easy to go back to any earlier draft at any time.

For background or reference, essentially metawriting, I use a secure, password-protected wiki. This is where I keep character sketches, plot synopses, and anything else that is about the story I’m writing but not the story itself. A private wiki gives me the ability to keep rich, hyperlinked notes that are not only accessible but editable from any web browser, including Internet Explorer Mobile.

This two-headed solution is vastly superior to anything else I’ve tried, but I must admit it has one weakness. I have to remember to check stuff back in via email before I go anywhere, which leaves me open to the same “oh crap I forgot to sync” crisis I had before. That said, for keeping everything up to date with as little effort as possible, it still beats syncing everything between my PDA and multiple PCs.