In the few months since Fictionaut’s release, a number of writers have described the service as a breath of fresh air. Some use it as a stage before publication – throw the drafts of your latest novel on Fictionaut, and you’re guaranteed a discerning audience. Most striking, however, is this love-letter by James Robinson, who says: “Fictionaut provides a round-the-clock, faithfully attentive audience. Bless its founders.” I saw that, thought for a bit, and emailed founder Jürgen Fauth for an invite.

Here are some thoughts, loosely connected, on Fictionaut.

Community

I’m must say that I’m most surprised at the level of community on the site. The majority of writing websites that I know have communities that aren’t particularly … nice. Fictionaut’s, however, not only seem to be consistently nice, but tend to also refrain from commenting on works they do not like. (If the writing is horrible, you keep quiet and go somewhere else). The net effect is that you feel – when you’re writing there – to be part of this welcoming, supportive group. And that’s a rather refreshing thing to have.

From experience, I’m not sure if such ’supportive writer culture’ can or will last forever. The culture exists naturally, at the moment, bubbling up from the community, but if at any point Fictionaut opens its doors to the general public, the influx of new members may seriously undermine the tone and pitch of the site. And that’s something I pray won’t happen, though I’m not sure how they’re going to do it. Fictionaut will have to be very careful when they expand; my hope is that they’d get the formula just right.

(I suspect that the solutions for maintaining quality discussion would have to be technological at heart, the same way Paul Graham has programmed several clever things into Hacker News, in order to maintain intelligent discourse. But how exactly this applies to writing I’m not particularly sure.)

Readability baked right in

Fictionaut forces its writers to publish stories according to a standardized, highly readable format. I posted a short story on the site and came away impressed with the quality of the user experience. Reader comments are placed in the sidebar, there’s a section for author notes, and the element placement leads me to suspect that everything you see on-site is deliberately designed to be that way.

There are little flourishes, too, like the beautiful popups that appear when you add someone as a friend, or when you’ve had a failed login:

I realize I’m a being a bit of a design geek here, but it’s hard to miss: someone has spent a lot of time making sure everything works intuitively on Fictionaut. I applaud his (or her) attention to detail.

Superb writing

Writing is good on Fictionaut. I sometimes spend hours on the site, reading newer, cooler, better stories – and I can say with some confidence that there’s a high standard to which most Fictionaut writers adhere to. At the very least, there’s a base level of competence that you don’t usually find anywhere else.

A large chunk of the site’s stories are flash fiction, followed by poetry, short stories, and a sprinkling of books-in-progress, posted chapter-by-chapter.

I should note that this quality didn’t happen by accident. Fictionaut’s founder, Jürgen Fauth, has a PhD in English/Creative Writing from USM’s Centre for Writers. The core community of the site was handpicked, I think – and new memberships are still dependent on invitations. Accordingly, the site currently leans towards literary fiction, and it feels – at times – like a literary magazine.

At the moment you either get in on invitation, or you apply for an invite. The application page leads me to suspect that Fictionaut enforces a filter for writers – you’ll either have to be competent enough, or established enough to get in (or you’ll have to know someone who’s already in, I suppose). This sounds scary and slightly elitist, but it probably explains the quality of the community and writing on the site today.

There’s a paragraph in the Venuszine Fictionaut review that says:

Pia Erhardt, a seasoned writer from New Orleans who recently had the “most favorited” story, “Ambulance,” agrees that it’s sometimes “terrifying” to post her unedited work, mostly because she respects what her fellow members are writing.

Quality begets quality, and so – again – I’m not particularly sure how they’re going to maintain this without the current invitation system.

(My favourite story on Fictionaut so far is Gold, by Ethel Rohan. To be fair, though, all her stories are just as good.)

Closing Thoughts

Fictionaut’s a little like an oasis, at the moment: it’s quite rare to find a such a large community of good writers online – even at its current size – who’re so supportive of each other. Despite my doubts with Fictionaut’s scalability, I must add that writing and reading on the site has been one of the more enjoyable things I’ve done, lately.

And so – while I’m not sure if Fictionaut can keep it up, or even where they’re headed, I really am quite grateful for the site, for what they’re currently doing for writers. I merely hope that Fictionaut ages gracefully, without the worst of teething problems that so often follows a growing – and social – community. I wish Fictionaut well.

I recently talked about how I found writing on paper to be more productive than writing on a computer. And so I started searching for ways to motivate myself – to complete chapters, meet deadlines and revise stylistic elements of whatever novel it was that I’m writing … whether it was on paper or on keyboard.

I thought my answer would lie somewhere on the internet. After all – it’s a rapidly growing ecosystem of blogs, websites, forums and chat conversations, some of which would be able to provide me with a solution, right?

Yeah, I was right. And the solution is paper.

1. The Task Progress Tracker

No – don’t get me wrong. The first solution starts off digitally, but it’s really a cool to-do list that you have to print out on … (waitforit!) strips of processed bark paper.
It’s called the Task Progress Tracker, part of David Seah’s Printable CEO series of productivity sheets – something we can all do with in our daily lives. You start off with jotting down the name of your task, and then colouring in your progress in 15 minute increments. The maximum time alocated for each task is 4 hours – David includes instructions for what to do on the sheet if you overshoot (rewriting your climax five times), or if the task is too easy (a one page chapter, perhaps).

I found the check at the end of a task very rewarding, and the fifteen minute bubbles prevented procrastination, even with the TV on full blast. And that isn’t all! David provides Destruct-o-Matic and Power User editions, cute little variations on the original idea. Click the links above to be taken to their respective pages, read up a little on his instructions, and print!

2. Language is a Virus!

For downtime and writer’s block I found the Language Is A Virus page, with little writing ‘toys’ and resources to help you overcome obstacles. It doesn’t do much, and it wouldn’t help everyone, but I always find inspiration comes from the most unexpected of places. If walking the dog and chatting over coffee fails, I’d go there and give their toys a little spin. My favourite? The Writing Prompt widget.

3. JDarkRoom

I checked my inbox about 10 times while composing this post. It was distracting, time consuming and a complete waste of energy (there were no new emails). Why not blank everything out, instead of having a plethora of links, buttons and options assault you while you write?

Enter JDarkRoom. It’s runs on both Windows and Mac, and is completely free. Wipes out everything and leaves you to deal with just your words on the screen. Green on black. A real beauty. 105 kbs, download it here.

4. Writer (The Web-based JDarkRoom)

If you’re stuck in, say, Nepal, with a computer that doesn’t have Java (gasps at Windows 98 users), you can still have JDarkRoom on your browser. Go to Writer and hit F11, and then proceed to write. In Firefox? Not to worry. Disable tabs so you won’t glance desperately at your inbox.

5. Google Homepage

Don’t look so shocked. The Google Personalized Homepage is a really useful tool for writing. For a daily dose of quick loading inspiration get the Writer’s Unblock Tool. Here’s one:

Imagine a Beduoin on a sick camel
with a maid in a fresh-ironed apron
A frightened girl prays to the Gods;
a gypsy wagon comes travelling by
while we all dream of provincial love.

Almost like poetry.

[Update]: Here’s a sixth tool, for naming your characters: Quick Baby Names. The site’s got a cool, searchable repository of names and I think it sells itself to two kinds of people: 1, expecting parents 2,writers. Need an exotic name for a plain character? Go grab yourself something under ‘X’.

The project site is a minor drawback on its own – it is hard to navigate and is a complete pain when you’re trying to find information about the software. A quick peek around tells me the site is running on Drupal, though I may be mistaken.

Perhaps a wiki will help, in due time.

I’m not exactly sure how Sophie will be accepted by the global eBook publishing community, and from what I see it looks like a glorified cross-platform version of Powerpoint. With comments, streaming and web integration.

But apart from all the Alpha hiccups (we must give it time to grow), Sophie has all the basics in place. Videos, music, pictures and good typography support are built in, as well as integration with servers. The inclusion of a Timeline feature is slightly perplexing to me – books are meant to be browsed at your own pace, are they not? – but overall it looks very promising.

I’ll see if I can help out with documentation – Sophie has a lot of potential; let’s hope it starts taking off in a year or two.

Download Sophie here.

The Institute’s blog states that an alpha version of Sophie will be released this week, which I can’t wait to get my grubby paws on. It should be very interesting to see how they’ve implemented the features they mentioned in their last press release.

A very rough roadmap for Sophie:

June — a more robust version of the current feature set

August — a special version of Sophie optimized for the OLPC (aka $100 laptop or XO) in time for the launch of the first six million machines

September — a beta version of Sophie 1.0 which will include the first pass at a Sophie (sic) reader

December — release of Sophie 1.0

I can’t wait for December. Find out more about Sophie here and here.

I personally don’t like FictionPress. Or FanFiction.net, for that matter. You don’t get to choose the fonts and font sizes your fiction is presented in, nor decide the environment in which a reader interacts with your words. There you just post fiction and pray that others start taking an interest in what you write. No upward climb towards being published, though some may argue it is a good way to improve your writing.

Urbis, which is basically a polished spin on FictionPress’s idea, does seem to do a few things right. It feels like your typical Web 2.0 service – shiny, polished and well presented. And there is a focused approach to writing – a goals section makes sure you work towards something, while making it easy to socialise with those who are working towards the same goal.

The Be Published goal had 1005 items at the time this post was being written.

Urbis also has a credit system, used as a way to encourage reviews of other people’s work. The underlying concept is easy enough to understand: you earn credits by reviewing other people’s works, and you spend them by revealing reviews other people have written about yours. It’s quite a brilliant move, frankly speaking – it makes sure people don’t hog the duvet and selfishly stick to their own writing.

I have no idea if Urbis will prove itself worthy of the many writers out there, nor how they intend to make their money. A brief stay at their homepage will likely convince you of the vibrant community they’ve managed to gather – creative, opinionated people commenting, reviewing and putting out works for the rest to read. Every few seconds a new quote/poem/novel chapter comes out, or a review of the said quote/poem/novel chapter.

So I decided to take a look of some of the work produced. Most were amatuerish, none of what most of us expect from a novel off a bookshelf. I have yet to find anything worth shouting about … but then again I’ve only spent half an hour browsing through the gallery, which wasn’t very easy to browse, though it looked nice enough. It’s daunting, to say the least – there’s absolutely no guarantee of finding something worth my time there … or worth the time taken to find it in the first place. Urbis lacks what Amie Street seems to have overcome: easy to find gems, which motivate more and more people to search for yet other gems within the system.

Urbis has still a few kinks to work out – I’d have liked it if users could post images (I won’t go so far as to say music – but pictures cut it pretty fine for giving the writing some identity), and they should at least have a Popular or Editor Selected section. But in areas such as discussion Urbis gets a thumbs up – there’s nothing more inspiring than being reviewed or reviewing the collective works of like-minded people. Maybe I’ll just use my account for access to the community. I’ll wait and see.

For now, at least, I’d place my bet on serializing fiction on blogs. Urbis better prove me wrong.