June 22nd, 2008
QuillPill.com: Novel Writing for the Cellular Generation
It should be obvious after a few months of my presence here at ATG, that I am the geekiest of the “girls.” From my unabashed love of genre fiction and sci-fi television (yes, I confess, I watched the free download of The Middleman that was released via iTunes long before the show ever aired, and I further confess that when I was seventeen I had a crush on Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. And yes, I mean Data, the character, not Brent Spiner, the actor who played him.) to my funky pink hair which matches the funky pink cover on my MacBook, I embrace the nerdy side of life, albeit with killer fashion sense, and mad grammar skillz.
My love of a new website, QuillPill, then, should also be unsurprising.
What is QuillPill? And why do I love it?
It’s a web-based interface where people can post their novels (or short stories, journals, etc.) in 140-character capsules. If that sounds a bit strange, consider the popularity of social media sites like Twitter, which also imposes 140-character limits on each entry. Why this number? Because it’s the lowest common denominator of character thresholds for a single SMS message sent from a cell phone.
Microblogging came first, and now we have micro-novel-ing. It’s ideal for when the perfect line strikes you just as you’re about to put that biodegradeable cardboard carton of store-brand organic non-fat milk in the grocery cart. Instead of searching for a pen, and scrawling unintelligible letters across the back of your grocery list, you whip out your phone, press a few buttons, and voila! You’ve written a “chapter” of your novel.
QuillPill is free to use, as a writer or a reader, and offers versions of itself for standard and mobile web browsers as well as a dedicated interface for the iPhone/ iPod Touch users among us.
The “browse” interface, for finding people to read, isn’t as intuitive as it should be, and the FAQs are still under construction, but the fact that other people can read your contributions make it much more fun than the 20th Century equivalent: scribbling notes on the backs of napkins.
(Oh, and, in case you’re wondering, my own work-in-progress, Illusions of Motion, can be found under the name MissMelysse.)
June 22nd, 2008 at 3:40 am
[…] QuillPill.com: Novel Writing for the Cellular Generation …him.) to my funky pink hair which matches the funky pink cover on my MacBook, I embrace the nerdy side of life, albeit with killer fashion… […]