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I generated ten premises using ChatGPT (of the form "X wants Y. But Z is in the way"), then ran them through a series of three prompts: outline, draft, revise. The outline gets the two-sentence premise and builds the outline using Holly Lisle's flash fiction method. The draft prompt gets a voice and style (derived from Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories by every.to's Spiral app, which includes word choice suggestions, hence all the "blooey" and "nothing stirring"). The revision prompt gets the draft and the word count, and is mostly about making sure the key to the ending is properly seeded.

Honestly, I could have done a lot better with the prompts, but optimizing the prompts felt like a bad idea, since I'd be optimizing for results on one model. So these are the prompts that Claude came up with based on my spec. Hopefully some of the stories will give you a good laugh.

The stable of models is pulled from the top twenty-ish models on OpenRouter, plus the top ten used in role-play & fiction category. Blind votes update the leaderboard using the Bradley-Terry model and Elo-style scoring (centered at 1500).

I've found the following resources helpful:

- 15 Rules For Crafting Effective GPT Chat Prompts (https://expandi.io/blog/chat-gpt-rules/)

- Awesome ChatGPT Prompts (https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts)

For more resources of like nature, you can search for "mega prompt".

Ha, yeah, you'll have to find your skeumorphism over there. :) That's a pretty neat achievement, I have to say.

But I don't actually want to use a typewriter, I just want to force myself to write without editing.

This looks great. I wouldn't have guessed typewriter-mode from "advanced key controls". For my use case, I needed to disallow any going back and editing. If Cold Turkey can do that, you may have yourself a new customer. :)

It's nice to know someone got the joke. :) Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

I've used every technology you mentioned there. :) Different strokes for different folks, for sure. Use what works. Don't use what doesn't.

I didn't realize it was such a long tradition! :D

Yes, I'm realizing there are four distinct mental processes to writing:

1. Planning 2. Production 3. Editing 4. Revision

Each one engages your brain in a different way. You can collapse them, but you get degraded performance when you do.

The cringe is very real. You have to push through and fix it in the next draft. :)

Right now I mainly use it in my morning warm-ups: I'll set a timer for five minutes and get as many words down as I can. It's taken some getting used to, but it's definitely helping me learn to Just Write. I plan to start using it for drafting my WIP soon.

Yes. Markdown formatting was a godsend to me. Just give me the text.

Parallel invention! Do you want to be Newton or Leibniz?

I'll be honest. Your typewriter has a better enamel finish. :)

Nice. Some people buy old Alphasmarts off of ebay.

Tools like Grammarly are great, but when I'm writing, I need to be left alone with the words. The squiggles come later, when I'm editing and revising.

Yeah, this is a great tactic for those inclined. I'm afraid I'm too impatient. I can type much faster than I can write long-hand, and there's a better chance of my being able to decipher it later. :)

This needs to happen. I wish my emacs-lisp fu were stronger, or I'd do it myself.

Ha, now that you mention it, I remember my mom using a lot of white-out too.

I bet. I'm in the first generation raised on Mavis Beacon, and I've been writing in malleable text environments most of my life. The temptation to edit as I go can be overwhelming, and I sometimes envy the writers who were forced by their tools to work in actual drafts.

I love the direction you're tracking here (pun not intended). The feature list is impressive, too. userTrack is now on the front of my list of options.

I've been working on a self-hosted social media scheduling tool (buffer/meetedgar-alike). So far it's just for my own use, but you've given me hope that there's a non-SaaS path to market. Thanks.

I started practicing Zettelkasten recently, using The Archive[1].

I already had a pretty large collection of less-structured notes from nvALT, and I love how the new "rules" really help to shape my new notes. I'm converting old notes as I have the time and need.

I was initially skeptical of the idea of timestamping notes in the filename, but I find it counterintuitively useful, and The Archive has really good support for it w/ the Cmd-U shortcut. The Archive also has multiple tabs, which help immensely over nvALT's single pane.

[1]: https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

Syncing is such a hard problem. How are you approaching it?

A Time Timer. :D The name is dumb, but I love that little thing. No ticking, and the alarm doesn't make me jump out of my chair when it goes off.

Very interesting! I've been looking for a self-hosted analytics tool to replace the Google. I'm going to take a closer look.

Btw, I don't think you need to start a broader self-hosted movement; it's been building for a while. See https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted for example. Keep up the good work! You're not alone.

I'm building a daily writing habit. At least five minutes of writing every day, no matter what. Got myself a nice timer and everything.

Once I have the habit solidified, it's back to that novel I've always wanted to write.

Hey Philip, this is great. I'm curious, what tools did you use to produce the book?

That's what inspired me. :) I'm really curious to read this.

Scriptwriting is just a particular form of writing, so any process you've developed would work whether someone is writing technical tutorials for video or sonnet form. :D

I remember when people said that RSS and blogs were dead, and they'd just be posting to Twitter and Facebook instead.

How'd that work out?

I'm really glad to see smart Publishers like Ben Thompson looking to head the Aggregators off at the pass.