A couple of years ago, there was a site called ficlets, a home for collaborative fiction stories put together in super-short 1024-character bursts. Ficlets was great, because anybody could jump in and add to a story in no time at all, and some interesting work grew out of it. When Ficlets disappeared, the active community it left behind had no place to go.
Until now. Ficly, from the creators of Ficlets, is like an updated, upgraded version of the original idea.

To participate, you just have to log in with Google, Yahoo!, Facebook or OpenID, then find a story and write a prequel or a sequel in 1024 characters. Your piece doesn't have to stand alone, it could just flesh out a character or place, or start a new scene for someone else to finish. I'm looking forward to reading some of the stuff coming out of Ficly, and speculating that maybe the evolution of print-on-demand services will play well with it. It would be too cool to have a long story you helped write shipped to your door in book form.

Birdhouse is a new kind of Twitter client for iPhone. Instead of focusing on keeping track of the most friends or supporting the most third-party services, Birdhouse is designed specifically for the composition and refinement of tweets. The app's developers, Adam "LonelySandwich" Lisagor and Cameron Hunt (who you might know as cameron.io.), are two guys who put a lot of thought into their tweets, and the design of Birdhouse really encourages users to raise the bar on their own posts.

Birdhouse isn't meant to be your main Twitter app. In fact, it doesn't display your Twitter feed at all. It's a minimal, no-fuss writing environment that's ideally suited to its medium. It neatly supports multiple Twitter accounts, storing your drafts for each and letting you give them a star rating, so you can get a quick visual read on how far along each one is. It also lets you manually back up your drafts to your email account for later use. Birdhouse also keeps track of your history of published tweets. It may not be for everyone, but I hope the mere fact that a tool like this exists makes people aware that Twitter can be more than another place to post your favorite links from Google Reader.

Write or Die from Dr. Wicked is quite an interesting application. You must keep typing or you will receive reminders to get back to work. Sometimes those reminders are quite unpleasant.

You can choose nice, gentle reminders, in the form of pop up boxes, the normal reminders which make the screen turn red and play music, or kamikaze reminders which start undoing what you have been typing if you stop. There are also Electric Shock reminders but, you can't always check that box.

This would be a perfect tool for anyone who needed to get a lot of words on paper in a specific amount of time. You can set word goals or time goals - or both. I gave myself a goal of 10 minutes and/or 20 words for writing this post. It is quite handy little tool for writers, bloggers or students who really need to get stuff done.

Plus, it's a lot of fun and the reminders are a good way to keep yourself on track if you have a tendency to stop working, stare off into space or get easily distracted. Or, if you're like me, having a word count goal and a timer makes me work that much harder to get all the words in before the timer goes off!

[Via The Renegade Writer Blog]

Rhyming dictionaries are great, not only because they help us finish off our salty poems, but also because they introduce us to spiffy new words like "Mashantucket."

WriteRhymes is a handy little resource for any aspiring poet - or anyone who like to annoy their co-workers by needlessly speaking in rhymes. Type some text in the box, alt + click a word, and suggested rhymes appear in a balloon. They're even grouped by syllable count for easy integration into your poetic rhythm.

You can even print, copy, and save your literary works via three handy buttons below the text box. Neato!

We did try, but sadly there are still no words that rhyme with orange or purple. Or verisimilitude, for that matter.

Do you type a lot of SMS or Twitter messages? Watching your character count closely? Maybe you should check out the Thsrs, a new thesaurus from Ironic Sans. Put in the grandiloquent word you were planning to use, and it will give you a shorter synonym to help you save characters while still making sense.

What inspired Thsrs? Well, David at Ironic Sans thought people needed a little help composing understandable messages "w/o needing 2 use ugly abbrev's." Seems like a fine idea to us! There might still be a few kinks to work out -- one commenter noted that 'awesome' humorously returned 'awful' as a synonym -- but Thsrs worked pretty well when we tested it. Try it yourself, and let your messages be understood!

Ever wish that Derek Zoolander had decided to open a night school? Or maybe opened a secondary school, so that once those kids that couldn't read good or do other stuff too well got better at it, they could go on to learn to do other things? What if Zoolander teamed up with the University of Phoenix, and offered online courses?

Your prayers have been answered, sort of. Gramlee is an online service for grammar checking and proofreading (and yes, there are definitely differences between the two). The idea behind Gramlee is fairly simple. You just cut and paste your writing into the Gramlee submission form, supply your email address, and an editor (yes, a live person) will proofread it for you and make revisions.

There's no word on what the Gramlee submission form does with smart quotes, but they do seem to heavily recommend a text editor (like Notepad) for document creation. There's no reason why you couldn't use Word, but we're having a lot of fun imagining editors using some colorful language when they get certain document formats.

To get you hooked, the first hundred words are free. You can buy additional words (up to 2,625) for varying amounts, or email a longer document for a price quote. Turn around time is allegedly about twenty-four hours on most documents.

The disclaimer here is that we didn't submit a piece to Gramlee. The "Examples" page shows some nicely edited pieces, complete with red ink mark ups. It would be endlessly cool if documents were revised with the revisions somehow marked. We fear they aren't marked, and that makes our linguistic spidey-senses tingle. So if you use the service, proofread the proofreaders, please. Even people who write good well make mistakes.

And of course, we needn't tell you that it's really not a good thing to submit your term paper to Gramlee for editing, right? Um. Right?

[Thanks for the tip, Mark!]

DarkCopy is a web-based alternative to programs like WriteRoom and DarkRoom that lets you compose text files in full (or almost full) screen to eliminate distractions like instant messages, Flash games, LOLcats, etc.

You can type in a regular browser window, or go full screen to make most of your screen (except for the browser's toolbar) black with greenish text. When you're done writing, you can save the file to your computer as a plain ole' .txt file.

This is handy if you want to work on a blog post, business idea, school paper, or love note without your attention being lost to something less significant.

[Via del.icio.us]

There are few more entertaining ways to pass the time on a flight than to pull out your copy of Skymall and begin inscribing funny quotations and thought balloons above the heads of the models hawking their wears. StoryTop takes that concept and makes it web based.

StoryTop is a little JavaScript tool that lets you include elements from their library of people, animal, and background clipart and then assign text and comments to the action taking place. The site is very easy to use and very kid and teacher friendly. Drag elements onto the canvas to start manipulating them, drag them back into the library to delete them. You can even create stories that develop over multiple pages. Editing and changing the size of the elements is very easy and has virtually no learning curve.

The example of the left took just thirty seconds to build.

No signup is required but you can create an account to save your stories and share them with friends or groups.

Ficlets spills some Web 2.0-coolness into a cup of collaborative fiction. Users submit super-short fiction stories -- really short. No, like really, incredibly short. All the fiction you can squeeze into 1024 characters short. -- which are then available for others to build upon with "sequels" (or build up to with prequels). They even provide you with inspiration for your stories, in the form of photos, themes, suggested beginnings and endings, and of course other ficlets.

All the Ficlets are licensed under the Creative Commons, giving the content a solid foundation for everyone to play fair and share upon. It's fun, creative and mildly addictive if you're into writing.

[via Boing Boing]

There are very few authors who don't use a personal computer to compose their works but, what if the computer could write a book on its own? That's precisely what a piece of software called MEXICA aims to do, and in fact is doing. MEXICA, developed by Rafael Pérez y Pérez, is a computer program capable of authoring stories all by itself.

MEXICA's work isn't half bad if you believe blind comparisons between it and the work of a human author. According to The Discovery Channel "In an Internet survey that pitted the computer-generated stories against other computerized stories, as well as stories written solely by a human, readers ranked MEXICA's stories highest for flow and coherence, structure, content, suspense and overall quality." That may be due to MEXICA's editing skills.

As MEXICA works it analyzes emotional content and connections between characters, as the program's author describes it, "The program views a story as interesting when tension levels increase and fall throughout the piece. If the program finds that the story is boring or incoherent in places, it will replace or insert atoms until a version is deemed satisfactory." So, in essence, MEXICA keeps writing and rewriting until it is able to satiate its own internal yawn-o-meter.

Drawing on key elements of human creative writing process, the thought behind a system like MEXICA is baffling. Pérez y Pérez hopes that MEXICA will help us write better stories, but doesn't necessarily see a program like MEXICA replacing the craft of an actual, human, writer. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to polish my resumé.

We all have at least one good novel in us, or so I've been told. For myself I know I have at least a few mediocre novels trying to work their way out. My ultimate dream is to one day write the next Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings over a lunch break, but until that happens all I can do is slug along with my writing exercises and meager attempts at character development. A great tool that helps me with these endeavors is a little freeware application called SLang by Ian Pegler (visit his website at ianpegler.com).

The key areas that SLang finds itself being really useful are scene planning and plot development. The tool lets you easily create "Events." These events in turn can be linked via dependencies to other events. The events can have a location and a description and the body content of the text you want to write. If you are planning a large or complex story this becomes invaluable as it is easy to adjust scenes and get an overview of the background information required before you write each section of the story.

The other really cool feature of SLang is how it controls drafting. Essentially every event has a text block in which you can write the text of your scene. Once you have a draft you can start a completely new draft with the click of a button. Create as many drafts as you like and when the text begins to jive with the overall feel of the story simply select a checkbox to mark the current draft as the one you want to use. It keeps all the other versions regardless.

SLang has been useful to me as a sort of "rapid prototyping" tool. I can setup the basic plot ark as well as quickly plop down details of each event or conversation in the story. As I get more time I flush out each event with a new draft that contains progressively more and more detail. SLang is a perfect writing tool for hopeful (yet ADHD afflicted) authors such as myself.

On Friday I linked to a little app for OS X called WriteRoom, which is a minimalist word processor for writers. A few of the commenters didn't quite "get" it (sorry, folks, but maximizing Word and changing the colors isn't remotely equivalent to a distraction-free writing environment*), but a lot of writers certainly do, including one developer who missed it so much when he had to use Windows that he just built a Windows version. Dark Room is a WriteRoom clone for Windows that's just as minimal and just as free.

*Though one commenter suggested installing Word 5.5 for DOS, which is closer.

[Thanks, Sam!]

As someone who usually has nine or ten Firefox tabs open in addition to Trillian in the corner and occasional Gmail Notifier pop-ups, I'm probably not the kind of writer WriteRoom is made for. WriteRoom is "a full screen, distraction free, writing environment" for Mac OS X. It takes simplicity to the extreme, presenting you with essentially nothing but what you've written, and allowing you to do little else but write. WriteRoom auto-saves as you write so you don't even have to worry about that. WriteRoom is a free download from Hog Bay Software.

Download Squad is looking for some new blood to add to our team. If you have a passion for software and web services, enjoy installing new apps on a daily basis, go to great lengths to get the most out of your computing experience, and have impeccable grammar and spelling, you might be what we're looking for.

To apply, send an e-mail with "DLSQ" and your full name in the subject line to jordan.running@weblogsinc.com containing all of the following:

• Your areas of interest and expertise. Be specific!

• Your blogging experience and blog URL(s). If you don't have blogging experience, be prepared to demonstrate significant writing ability and background.

• A bit about yourself, why you think you'd make the best addition to our team, and how much time, energy, and dedication you're willing to contribute to Download Squad.

• And last, but far from least, three original writing samples. We want to see what you'd write your first day on the job. Content and length is up to you, but it'd be smart to take your cues from what you've seen on Download Squad, and variety in your submissions is desirable. We like writers who are smart, concise, opinionated-but-open-minded, and independent. Surprise and impress us.

Blogging for Download Squad is a paid position. Incomplete applications will not be considered, and due to the potential volume of applications we cannot respond to every applicant.