Tools of the Trade

I have a few writing tools on my site. The latest ones are for writing hyperfiction; if you don’t know what that is or what the other tools are, I have a page about that.

My Scrivener template, Scree, is for writing hyperfiction/gamebooks in Scrivener, for publication using Twee/Twine. I’ve made a few story formats for Twine as well: Paloma, a Jonah replacement for Twine 2, DotGraph, a proofing format for displaying your Twine story nodes as a graph, and a few conversion formats. For more details see the Scree or Twine tools pages.

The Random Family Tree Generator is a product of NaNoWriMo 2013, during which I wanted to populate several dwarf clans, fast. (It’s the closest thing here to the procedurally generated greatness of donjon’s site.)

My sffms package is a LaTeX document class for writing speculative fiction that I maintained for many years.

Miscellany

My latest creation is CardPen, a tool for creating playing cards and other large-format game images in your browser using HTML, CSS, and Mustache. It’s intended for DIY or low-volume commercial printing; high-volume printing usually requires formats other than PNG. The examples page shows the sorts of things I’ve done with it, and of course I blogged about making yet another piece of software to do something people already do.

My app.net app Paste is a pinboard-style app that I sometimes use to collect writing links. It was hosted at Amazon in the days of app.net; it is now running on pnut.io; I first blogged about it here. My last app.net app, Market Bucket, is a shopping list app that I still use today on pnut.io. I also wrote a simpler app.net app, Crick Ticker, for setting stream markers on Alpha, the app.net microblogging service, which I haven’t ported to pnut.io, so it does nothing at the moment.

I wrote a reading tool, a bicolorization bookmarklet, along with some revisions to an existing bicolored Tetris game, intended for use with anaglyph glasses. As usual, there are more details in the blog.

I’ve also made some bookmarklets for the ColourLovers website, and enough other games and gaming tools that they deserve their own page.