About
It started with a stack of photocopies.
I write, and I go to my local writers’ guild. At every meetup, each member arrived with reams of copies: a ten-page story or a chapter, printed ten times over, handed round the table so everyone could read and mark it up. Paper, ink, and an evening of everyone’s time, for one round of notes.
Watching that ritual, I felt I should bring it into the digital age. The reading aloud, the pen in the margin, the hour with people who take your pages seriously are the point. What was not the point was the hour or more spent leafing through each copy to integrate the critiques and line edits.
What it became
The initial idea was simple: save some paper, save everybody time. And make the core functionality free for the writer community. It grew into the app for getting critique on your unpublished writing, whether via a beta reading round, a writers’ workshop or guild meetup, or a “crit swap” between writer pals.
The idea driving all my decisions as I build this is that anyone who wants to build their own circle of writers or readers, with the aim of improving their craft, should be able to do it easily and in one place—not scattered across emails, shared documents, and stacks of pages on a desk.
Where it goes from here
What is in the app today is on the features page, and I am careful to keep that page honest. The rest of this section is where I want to take it from here.
- Export every note, mark, comment, and reaction, so feedback can travel into Scrivener or into whatever tool you use to apply the mechanical fixes, AI tools included, on your own terms and outside the app.
- Your feedback as data over time. Which tags you keep getting, which ones fade, how your readers’ reactions shift from one draft to the next—to witness your own improvement.
I commit to two things: no AI will ever consume your pages inside the app, and your writing shall never be used as training data. The app helps you collect the critique, but what you do with it is yours.
Who I am
I am an avid writer and poet, and a software and data engineer by trade. That pairing is the reason this exists. At that writers’ guild table, after years modernizing similar manual processes, I remembered: sometimes the most useful solutions solve an unseen need.
Chris Dabel
Free for writers, group members, and beta readers.