For the past several months, I have been looking for a community that is interested in co-writing stories in a sort of text-based role play format. Not as structured as a traditional game and definitely something that has plot and character in addition to smut.

It has been wholly unsuccessful. The few sites I do find are often very fandom focused (where I am interested in developing original stories) or focused on just getting off. I am all for that, but that isn’t what I am aiming for here.

Then there are those sites with writers who out-pretentious the worst I have met in college writing programs. They have a book of hoops you must jump through to prove yourself worthy of their prose. Every time I read their carefully formatted condescension, I just think “We’re not writing War and Peace, xxBloodDarkMercyxx¹, we’re writing about a hot bunny girl and grizzled warrior fighting and fucking their way through a cookie-cutter fantasy world. Get over yourself.”

It’s good for me, I guess. I know to never waste my time with those authors.

What pisses me off is that it becomes a form of gatekeeping, or even worse, it pushes people to AI bullshit. It is easy to get discouraged especially if you are not writing in a first language, or you are learning, or this is your first foray into this form of writing. Curious writers give up, or they find a bot and slowly descend into regurgitated text vomit (did I mention I really hate AI?).

I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to writing critique. I have been in a lot of workshops where authors pride themselves on cruelty in the name of “honest feedback.” To a one, those authors are awful human beings. They take up space and suffocate the creativity of others. Give me your typos and your mixed metaphors. Let’s work on them. I want cool ideas to build on. That is what makes co-writing and role-play fun.

We build it together.