3. Working in a traditional book workflow like Scrivener. You don’t get REPL type feel with a live-looped audience, plus it sucks for when you want to publish worldbuilding content + stories
4. Git+markdown static sites are flexible but incomplete on distribution and paywall
Conversation
I have a fairly clear spec in my head but don’t see anything that automates it enough that you can focus on writing a larger thing and also let an audience watch the work take shape live without getting disoriented
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The only person I know trying to wrote a true on,one book is but afaik he doesn’t have distribution set up or a way to REPL the audience in as he tweaks chapters or inserts out-of-order elements
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Many subtleties
1. If search/replace a name across the draft text, the ideal update would be “Alice is now Bob” not “These 147 pages have been updated”
2. I should be able to mark changes private until I publish
3. There should be latest release/stable release distinction…
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The reader experience should be like following a software project, but more coherent
- Ability to subscribe to only stable release updates or all
- Ability to be alerted only when the plot moves forward as opposed to rewrites/edits of old material
etc
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Interestingly this makes team writing (a TV show for eg) easier. Showrunner maintains Bible pages. Writers room produces episode treatments, new character proposals, etc. Interested fans can buy backstage pass and watch the show develop though 9-% will only want finished show
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If you’d asked me 10y ago, I’d have said this won’t work because readers want full escapist immersion in a story. Now I’m not so sure. Between weird metamodern fiction taking off, fan fiction, fandom sites, gaming, and what I’ve seen in Hollywood studio tours/theme parks…
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… there is a participatory fiction medium waiting to be born.
And for writers, it’s a way to sustainably make money off a normally backend type writing process that you either do on spec with no feedback, or get an advance to underwrite
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This product need (and I know I’m not the only one who needs this) is basically “Serialize and Publish a Second Brain as it hardens and gels, behind a paywall”
The “content garden” subculture is an improvised version of about half this product.
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I was initially excited by the digital garden movement but it’s too atemporal for me. I like a strong sense of time in my writing process, as well as a sense of “in-world time” in whatever I’m writing
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Basically out-of-order computation/dataflow architecture has not been invented for writing. In computing it went mainstream in the late 80s, and modern computers are all OOO at lower levels though they present an illusion of sequentiality at higher levels
Replying to
I could probably spec this out fairly completely to be productized. But going by product manager experience 15y ago, it would be a near full-time job.
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Actually, now that I think of it, I already have 46k worth of a rough-finished and published/tested fiction (the fiction part of Art of Gig) ready and perfect for this kind of medium. I even conceived it as a TV-show style thing set in an extended universe with worldbuilding.
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I think what I might do is put that draft in a Roam graph and open it up to anyone who seriously wants to either a) experiment with a publishing model for it b) continue expanding the universe with more stories.
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Basically, I want to write the way I already know how, in a web interface (Roam-like) with at most adoption of markdown syntax, and have it automatically pipe into an evolving world behind a paywall.
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Kinda like publishing a Disneyland basically, with new rides weekly, plus updates to old rides, and more scenery, and maybe even stores for buying merch.
Token-gated distributed architecture would actually be pretty cool for it, but I suspect it needs to be be Web2.5 first.
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Ie, with token-gating intent, with distributed peering. For eg. if I do publish my yakverse fiction this way and you wanted to add your own corner to that extended universe, you could spin up a "node" with a protocol handshake with mine and write your stories there
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If a reader had one of my NFTs to read my corner of the disneyland, they might get a discounted in-universe portal nft to go to yours. You can also have a full-priced entrance to your node.
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The extended universe grows by accretion, like mastodon fediverse, as a social network of trusted storytelling nodes. If you don't like how I'm developing my threads of the narrative, you can fork an alt-universe, within whatever rights I allow (eg CC0 or CC-BY-SA-3)
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But to start with, a centrally curated/controlled site that produces a paywalled subscription changelog newsletter that's actually fun to use as an ongoing guided tour reading experience. Like Donald Duck writing a "what's new in Disneyland this week" email to season pass holders
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If you're interested, indicate interest in reply to this thread, and whether you want to build the infrastructure or add to the story. twitter.com/ling_xiao_ling
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Web3 would allow for one incomplete realization of this idea, primarily missing the serialization and distribution mechanism -- known weaknesses of the Web3 stack. Web3 is also missing discovery, but that's not important in this case
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Replying to @vgr
Tbh I think this is precisely Lore on web3, albeit the broader version of it that’s not 100% in line with your definition
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I think I'm going to do this for real. I am producing ebooks for the 2 volumes worth of nonfiction issues of the AoG newsletter, but that didn't seem right for the fiction, which is another volume's worth. This seems perfect for it.
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Hmm... the Ribbonfarm Future CMS contest: register for "developer access" to 47k words of extended universe content and a chance to win $1000 in 2 categories: "Disneyland" toolchain that meets minimum viable specs and adding 3000 words of new material to the universe
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I think I can afford to drop up to 2k on this
500/300/200 1st, 2nd, 3rd prizes for both CMS-tech and writing contributions to the EU.
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If anyone wants to sponsor bigger prizes, lemme know...
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