If your Princess is in another castle, maybe you can write her out of it. StoryShop is a new piece of software for writers by the guys who wrote Write, Publish, Repeat and it aims to make it wicked easy to write fiction.
Created by Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant, and David Wright, the product walks you through the steps of character creation, scene writing, and plot. By cutting the process of fiction into manageable steps the team makes it far less daunting to write your magnum opus about space vampires from the Old West who wear steampunk gear.
The team has essentially created a system to manage the relationships between characters and scenes. Because the team writes so much – 2 million words a year – they constantly have to know who is doing what. This is designed to help.
We’re always in the middle of several series at Sterling & Stone, set in many distinct story worlds. Keeping track of what’s happened and what needs to happen in the next book is tricky. Keeping track of who is whom — and who knows what — is even trickier. We practically maintain big, thick dossiers on each, as if our books are unsolved cases. We pre-plan our stories to make the whole thing as easy as possible … but there’s only so much that an inherently chaotic system can do.
So we got to thinking: What if, rather than trying to track everything manually, there was an app that could help us?
While I still love Scrivener for novel writing, this app looks pretty solid and useful. Because the team writes mostly well-reviewed genre fiction (and there’s nothing wrong with that, mind you) they should know best of all how to do it efficiently.
The team is looking to raise $80,000 to complete development of the app and it will be offered as a subscription service. Lifetime access costs $299 while a few months will set you back $49.
These guys know how to write and I’m really interested to see what they produce. It will be one of the biggest changes in the writing market in years and in a world full of demons to kill and fishmen to woo, I think we need a tool that will make it easier for Trogdor the King of the Salamandermen make it to the throne room of Zlorgbar in one piece.