If you find yourself with your finger hovering over the final keystroke necessary to type an em dash, or pausing to decide if you should backspace the occurrence of the word “elevate” that you just typed, ask yourself a simple question: Is this my voice? There’s a good chance it actually is, and in that case you should type what you were planning to type. Because if you don’t, you’re self-censoring. You’re voluntarily surrendering the ability to express yourself in an authentic way. And for what? To avoid the possibility that an Internet Imbecile declares that your words were not your own? We all know that person is an ignorant jackass. Their words aren’t important.

Yours are.

Your soul isn't indexable. Fix it.

Strip out the lyrical nonsense. Standardize your grammar. Run a goddamn spellcheck. Write clearly, concisely, and with machine-readability in mind. Turn your unstructured, emotional diary into clean, structured data.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

The most powerful tool for world-building is layering in references to past events left unexplained. And the biggest disease franchises now suffer from is the compulsive urge to explain EVERY. FUCKING. THING.

real-time collaborative editing software

Proteus as a Writing Stimulus

An explosion is heard from the depths of the SPACESHIP. An alarm goes off.

Writespace is a fullscreen writing environment for Word (...) inspired by Dark Room and Write Room

an online community dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the addventure, a type of collaborative fiction.

"Once you’ve written and shared your ficlet, any other user can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel."