Apps for authors

I’ve been dusting off old ideas to add writing tools to my Writing Streak site. This week I’ve been focusing on writing prompts. You may recognize these from my app-building days in 2024, although now they’re fancier and integrated with my site.

• Oblique Writer is loosely based on a deck created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. When experiencing a creative block you draw a single card. This is meant to knock something loose in your brain.
• Story Lines is based on the card deck I use to define single passages. It randomly selects a generic subject and pairs it with a structural format. Using this creates more diversity in a manuscript.
• Prompt-bot is a version of Protobot for writers. It creates a story prompt based on a random category and random constraint. Here the prompt itself acts as an interface, letting the user click the groups of words to reroll that part of the output.

All three of these use markdown lists as data, so my job going forward is to improve the apps by editing the lists.