A little pimping...

So, I'm a member of Young Writers Society, run by the ever-fabulous Nathan Caldwell. It's a online community of writers, mostly aged 13 to 25, with wonderful reviews, a chat room, forums about just about everything, live feeds of friend activity, blogs, and a whole crap-load more. I've been a member for three years and running now and I can't think of leaving. The people are awesome, the site is awesome, it's just awesome.

But there is something even more awesome looming in the future...

Nate is currently working on a sort of sister-site to YWS, called Writer Feed, which he has developed based on all the things he knows now that he had wished he had known about when he began YWS. The idea behind it is social networking for writers, aimed mostly at writers 18+ as a more serious alternative to YWS. It's set to launch really, really soon (the date's sort of nebulous, since Nate's programming in his free time - something like 20 hours of work remain, I understand) and I am super-crazy excited. A review and more pimping will come when it does finally launch (right now, the above link just leads to a spiffy "coming soon"-type page).

But, in the meantime...

Nate has given us WriterFeedPad, which is simply awesome. Similar in concept to Google Docs or other online document sites, it gives you a place online to type up documents and the like. The formatting tools are fairly simple, but for a short story or novel or just notes to yourself, it's perfect. Plus, the really cool things about it are the way you can make a pad public or share it with other users (so that more than one person can be working on the same pad - each shows up as a different color) and it tracks the revisions in real time (and has the niftiest slider bar thing that will literally take you through every change you make in a document in a sort of running film way, allowing you to stop at any time and export that particular place in revision as a document). It's already linked to YWS, but apparently it's also going to be hooked up to WF when it finally launches!

Super, super excited. I've been using WriterFeedPad for several documents already, putting in some handwritten notes and drafts of my hedgehog story and even hashing out some scenes from an idea that just won't leave me alone tonight (for real, it's again around midnight and my brain won't shut off).