Etydhv

I want to write a short story (and maybe later a book) together with a colleague from work.

Is there an online service which we can use to do this in a convenient way?

Useful features would be (not all necessary):

• write at the same time and immediately see what the other one is changing


• see latest updates from the other writer highlighted


• manage tasks (maybe in a kanban board)


• manage timelines like upcoming deadlines

What are you using for shared writing?

This sounds like Google Docs, perhaps combined with Trello (for the Kanban board and calendar view), would do for you.

It's got live updating -- I don't think it tracks edits by author exactly, so you could agree on a convention -- like my students on one team devised a rule where each of them owned 2 colors. (4 students, so like light blue and dark blue was one, red and pink was another, etc.) Anything NEW they would do in one of their colors. Any EDITS to others' work, they'd do in their edit-color. (They copied original sentence to comments, in case people wanted to compare.) They would comment each paragraph with "ok" if they had no changes. Their teamleader would turn paragraphs BLACK if everyone had said "ok".

Since it's only 2 of you, that part could be simpler.

If you want to stay in Google things, you could fake a KanBan with Google Sheets, just name your columns, and each spreadsheet Cell becomes an Item, which you can move through the process. And then Google Calendar of course also exists for deadlines or blocking out time to write.

But Trello is free to use and lets you link to Gdocs also, so that's probably a better Kanban/Deadline solution.

Only tool I can think of would be Google docs.

You can have multiple people writing in a document at the same time and see where their cursor is, there is no color coding on who's typing by default.

You can enter what's called "suggestion mode" where changes you add are not validated immediately but merely appear highlighted to your color, allowing the owner to accept or refuse the change.

For updates, it keeps track of any changes through the document, so any day you can view the history of the doc and it will show you what was changed and by whom.

There is however no task or timeline managing that I can think of.