| Say you're writing an epic novel with dozens of characters and a century-spanning narrative. Things can get confusing. How old is a given character supposed to be in a certain scene? What color eyes does she have again? These are the kinds of problems Vikram Chandra has set out to solve with an ambitious piece of software he calls Granthika, a writing assistant now available online. As Andrew Leonard writes this week on Backchannel, Chandra is a natural for the job, given that he's the author of, among other books, the sprawling novel Sacred Games (you might know it from Netflix's serialized adaptation) and that he's also a legit coder who worked his way through college as a programmer. (He also wrote Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, a nonfiction paean to programming, literature, and ancient Indian philosophy.) Chandra admits that Granthika is a classic instance of an entrepreneur scratching his own itch. As Leonard explains, "From practically the beginning of his love affair with computers, Chandra has lusted after a word processor that will keep him from making inadvertent mistakes. So he built one." Now other writers have the opportunity to scratch that same itch. Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED |
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