Conversation

Replying to
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
1
7
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
1
7
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
2
6
Replying to and
In a maybe-slightly-weird coincidence, I've been thinking in the past month about a payment model. This is a big problem for many people (we'd like to get paid to write, and that's hard). I have a new theory of how to do it.
2
Replying to
I suspect a lot of people want to write this way. Trad writers just don’t even realize it’s almost doable. Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress is just too creaky for this though. You can make them work with effort, but I think this needs updated foundations. Roam checks off a lot for me.
3
4
Replying to and
And yes, I do think seamlessly integrated email and paywall is a must-have. Unless someone is wealthy, any project that can use such infrastructure is too time consuming to take on without cash flow attached. It’s basically trying to replace book advanced with plumbing.
1
4
Replying to and
Trad book authors tend not to want this because between a fetish for trad workflows (“as close to longhand/manual typewriter as possible” seems to be Scrivener’s philosophy), and dependence on advances + starving artist dignity, this feels profane to them.
1
1
Replying to
Yes Scrivener is awful (for my purposes). I’ve still got a lot of stuff in it, but switched to Markdown + git about five years ago. I want an organizing layer on top of that with a nice GUI that syncs with the server…
1
2
Replying to
Yeah I’ve got all my longer drafts mostly sitting in scrivener still, not moving, hence this direction of thought I got a couple of the more developed ones mostly ported to roam where they’re starting to inch along, and manually serializing on substack as they yield