The writing community is wired. From online writing forums, to podcasts, to market guides, to facebook groups and digital publications, the written word &mdash and everything that goes into its production &mdash has found a second home on the web.
But there's one aspect of the craft that hasn't really benefitted from everything the internet has to offer: the writing process itself. Many of the basic things that writers of all stripes do more or less every single day still haven't tapped into the online revolution. Things like:
This isn't to say that writers haven't adapted to the personal computer revolution. No one's banging out paper manuscripts on typewriters anymore. But it's hard to argue that we've embraced the full potential of the internet. Instead, we use a mishmash of different tools that are, more often than not, only barely suited to the task.
How many of us have folders on our computers overflowing with documents whose contents we're only dimly aware of &mdash and, often, multiple drafts of the same document, each with a slightly different file name?
How many of us email Word documents to our friends and colleagues for critiques, and then painstakingly collate their individual responses? How many of those responses come in the form of stacks and stacks of paper?
How many of us keep track of our manuscript submissions with simple lists &mdash on paper, in Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets &mdash that we have to painstakingly, and manually, keep up to date?
How many of us have thought: there has to be a better way?
Well, there is. Meet ScribbleSquid: your online writing resource.
ScribbleSquid does a great many things &mdash and, as time goes on, will do a great many more &mdash but it's focused on one key mission: to help writers take advantage of everything the online world has to offer. With it, you can:
You can use as many, or as few, of these features as you want. One thing ScribbleSquid emphatically doesn't want to do is force you to change anything about your process. You can still write everything in your word processor of choice. You can keep all of your work stored on your computer &mdash or wherever you prefer &mdash and only upload what you choose to ScribbleSquid. You can make your manuscripts visible to as many, or as few, people as you like: the entire world, a few select people in your group, or no one at all.
ScribbleSquid isn't interested in telling you how to go about your business. All it wants to do is give you what you need, and then get out of the way.
Anyone fortunate enough to have been in a writing group knows how important they are to the writing process. These tiny communities tend to fly under the radar, but they give solitary scribblers everywhere a sense of community, a place to escape from the inside of their own heads, and &mdash more concretely &mdash a place to get their work read and critiqued, by people they trust.
Unfortunately, not all of us are lucky enough to be in a group. The vagaries of location and circumstance often make it difficult to find like-minded people to exchange stories with.
This is where the ScribbleSquid Groups feature comes in. The internet is, in the many ways, the death of location: it allows people scattered all over the world to realize all the advantages of being local, without having to be physically present. ScribbleSquid builds on top of the internet's basic plumbing by allowing you to establish online groups, submit manuscripts to that group, and then asking its members to comment on those manuscripts &mdash all under the umbrella of the same service. It's a painless, friendly way to capture a little of the shared intimacy of getting your work critiqued in a class, or a workshop, or a friend's living room.
Setting up a ScribbleSquid group is easy:
It really is as simple as that. Your story will only be visible to your group, and they'll be able to mark it up, just like a paper manuscript, by annotating specific portions of the text, or holding forth on the story as a whole. But, either way, their comments will show up online, for all to see. It's not the same experience of sitting around a table with your friends, but we think it comes very close.
ScribbleSquid is also a one-stop-shop for managing your documents. Not only can you post stories for others to see, you can also store multiple drafts of all your stories. There are a lot of reasons to keep track of individual drafts this way. You can:
It's easy to upload your drafts to ScribbleSquid. Once they're in the service, you can label them, compare them to previous drafts, publish them to groups, and more.
You can also use ScribbleSquid to track your stories' submission history, in a way that's integrated seamlessly into each story's dashboard page. There are many advantages to this. You can:
Keeping track of all your story submissions is one of those tedious things that writers absolutely must do, and do well. ScribbleSquid takes care of most of the grunt work for you, so you can focus on what's important: writing new material to submit.
This is just the beginning. ScribbleSquid will eventually be introducing many more features, from comprehensive data on markets, to group and public forums, to manuscript preparation services, to online publishing. We aim to be a clearinghouse for everything writers need to manage their stories, and their careers.
So try it out. Starter accounts are free, and, should you choose to move to the next level, our Basic and Premium memberships unlock much more of what ScribbleSquid has to offer, for a reasonable monthly fee.
There's a whole internet out there. We might as well use it.