Seshat is a web tool to help you planning, organizing and writing your own book, novel, scenario...
The idea came during my first NaNoWriMo. At this point I was using yWriter 6 which is very useful but was not totally suited for my needs so I decided to create my own tool and to share it with anyone who could be interested as well.
create
Focus on writing
While writing, you're focused on your story with minimal toolbars displayed on the page
Focus on writing
Text editor supports usual shortcuts natively:
CTRL + C / CTRL + X / CTRL + V: copy / cut / paste content
CTRL + B: if a text is selected, put it in bold, if not, put cursor in bold mode (press again to go back to normal)
CTRL + I: if a text is selected, put it in italic, if not, put cursor in italic mode (press again to go back to normal)
CTRL + U: if a text is selected, put it underlined, if not, put cursor in underline mode (press again to go back to normal)
lock
Security
Your story can't be read by anyone other than you until you want to unveil it
Security
You're the only one able to read your novel and work on it until you decide to unveal it. Data are cyphered directly in your browser before being sent to Seshat and decyphered locally as well which means that Seshat has no way to decypher data that belongs to you. On the other side, it also implies that if you loose your password, you'll loose all of your data.
As another consequence, Seshat will also requests you to confirm your password for few specific actions like creating a new novel or synchronizing data accross several openned sessions.
A back-up mechanism will be created to allow you to save externally your data in clear text.
devices
No permanent connection
Once you've loaded your story on your device, you can continue to write even without any connection
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Share your story
You can share your story with your friends or with the world, online or by exporting to PDF or EPUB with Watermark system to track your copies
description
Sticky notes wall
Put all your ideas on sticky notes and create links between them. It's as having your wall into your pocket
chrome_reader_mode
Plan your story
You can plan your story, define your characters and places and link public images to them
memory
Self hosting
You can host your own Seshat instance as you want
Self hosting
Source code is fully available on project Github . It requires a Java environment to run.
trending_up
Follow your progress
Statistic module will show you how often you write, how long and your average word speed
Current version
Seshat has just hit the first alpha version! Even if I still have a long road to meet the features I plan, it contains:
Users management: account creation, quota (as for now any user can create an account), lock / unlock users as admin, change password
Security: foundations are here. Server has never access to the content of your projects in plain text
Novel creation
Editor: basic editor is implemented, allowing you to add/remove chapters, perform text format changes using keyboard (bold, italic, undelined, copy/cut, paste) and save your work (for now it's a manual button but Seshat will ask you to confirm if you quit before saving)
I'm working on two major features: export as an EPub (and potentially PDF) and the stick notes wall, if you want to join, do not hesitate
Stay tunned!
Seshat is at its early stage and therefore will evolve. To be totally honest, project already changed quite a bit already. If you have ideas, feedback or just a message, you can follow technical articles on my blog, contact me or go to the project page on Github
Your story is worth to be written