So we built a content management system for our shared writing project...
This sounds a bit over the top even saying it - but we did. To give some background I'm writing a 4-5 vol GN with a writing partner in a different city. We meet weekly on the phone and write / discuss ideas for 1-4 hours. I record the conversations on my iphone and the auto transcription has been invaluable - but it seems to give up transcribing after an hour. So we break up our calls.
I am the "documentor" and created a story bible in Word with auto updating index etc... which worked well for a bit but once it exceeded 50 pages it was starting to get unmanageable. We have done substantial world building and "rule" creation for the story but it was getting increasingly difficult to track / locate updates the other person had done. My writing partner has multiple docs on the go and he was struggling with the system as well.
We looked around but there was really nothing out there that seemed to meet our needs - at least for how we write and meet. So I built a CMS. The way it works is that it takes our raw call transcripts and passes it through an API with Claude and generates an executive summary of the call as well as a writer's room summary. From there it generates a list of agreed upon / locked canon, carry forward ideas that get pushed to either a weekly or master todo list as well as an itemized list of idea stubs or concepts that need further refinement (or dismissal). Eventually concepts are pushed either to the bible (admin / mechanics) or the story itself.
There's a bunch of other features as well but that's the jist of it. Is this insane? are we reinventing the wheel? How do other authors keep lore / canon heavy worlds in check and organized especially when writing with a partner?