The Writing Desk

A workspace for your own poems and stories, built around the idea that the margin should read your draft. It's a three-pane editor: your pieces on the left, the manuscript in the middle, and a docked inspector on the right holding the scaffold, reports, Workshop, revisions, craft tools, and sharing.

It handles two kinds of piece — poems and stories — and the editor, reports and goals change to suit which one you're writing.

The Desk never writes for you. It critiques, scans and measures; the words stay yours.

See alsoAbout the Writing DeskOpen your desk

No. A free account gets a real desk, with caps:

• 2 projects, and 1 loose draft that isn't filed in a project.
• 10 versions per draft.
• The full editor for poems and stories, per-line syllable counts, goals and streaks, 7 days of version history, and export forever.

A paid plan adds:

• Unlimited projects and drafts.
• The eight form scaffolds and their grading.
• Meter readings and rhyme-scheme letters in the gutter.
• The five computed reports.
• Creating share links.
• A longer version-history window.

Filing a piece inside a project means it no longer counts against the one-loose-draft cap — so a free desk can hold more than one piece.

See alsoPlans and pricing

• A poem — "+ New poem" in the sidebar drops you straight into the editor. No naming step.
• A story — the "A story" panel under the work table: give it a title and press "Start a story".
• A project — the "A project" panel: a title plus a choice of poem collection or story with chapters.

Inside a project, the add box says "Add a poem" or "Add a chapter" depending on which kind you made. A piece you never title is saved as "Untitled draft".

See alsoOpen your desk

Yes. It saves shortly after you stop typing, again when you click away, and once more if you close or background the tab — that last one uses a browser mechanism designed to survive the page going away, so a closed tab doesn't cost you keystrokes.

The status bar tells you where you stand at all times: Unsaved changes, Saving…, Saved, or Up to date. If a save ever fails it says so explicitly rather than pretending.

A scaffold checks your live draft against the rules of a fixed form and marks each requirement pass, warn, or fail. Eight forms:

• Sonnet (Shakespearean) and Sonnet (Petrarchan)
• Villanelle
• Sestina
• Ghazal
• Haiku
• Limerick
• Blank verse

The checks are specific — "Turn (volta) at line 9", "End-words rotate 6-1-5-2-4-3 each stanza", "Envoi carries all six end-words". A villanelle scaffold tracks both refrains and offers to insert one at the line where it's due; a ghazal offers the radif taken from your own opening couplet.

Scaffolds are a paid feature, and they only apply to poems. Grading is generous where it should be — an eye rhyme grades amber, not red.

See alsoThe forms library

Passage feedback reads one selection closely. Highlight at least 20 characters (up to 2,000) and a control appears reading "Feedback on this passage · 1 credit". Ask for the same passage again on unchanged text and it replays free.

The Workshop is a chat that has read your draft and the rest of its project — ask about a line, a stanza, or a doubt. One credit per message, up to 1,000 characters, with the last twelve turns kept as context. There's no cache here, because no two questions are the same. A failed message costs nothing and leaves no history.

Neither is restricted by plan — a free account with a credit can use both. One catch on the free plan: passage feedback snapshots your draft first, so if you've already hit the 10-versions-per-draft cap it stops before spending anything.

Three layers, priced differently.

Five computed reports run instantly and cost no credits at all: Echoes, Rhythm, Pacing, Dialogue tags (stories), and Meter wobble (poems). They're paid-plan features, but they never charge a credit.

Three AI reports cost a credit each, on poems: Clichéd rhymes, Abstract vs concrete, and a Corpus benchmark against the Storgy library. Re-run one on unchanged text and the button relabels itself free.

Submit for review runs a full instrument over the whole draft — Rate (a 1–10 score with a rubric), Check (a line-by-line edit), or Analyze (a close reading). One credit each, with story equivalents for story drafts.

Every review pins the text it analyzed as a permanent version first, so a score always refers to a draft you can go back and read.

Yes. The Share tab mints a read-only page at a private link. It shows the version as it stands when you create it — later edits stay on your desk until you say otherwise.

• Readers need no account.
• You choose whether they can leave notes on a stanza and whether they can give kudos.
• Expiry is yours to pick: none, 7 days, 30, 90, or a year.
• The page carries no email address, no plan, no other pieces, and no way back into your desk. Its browser tab reads simply "A draft shared with you".
• It's hidden from search engines, and every bad or revoked link returns the same blank 404 so nobody can probe for one.

The link is shown once and cannot be recovered — we store only a fingerprint of it, so nobody, us included, can re-display it later. Creating links needs a paid plan; revoking them and moderating comments is free forever, including after a subscription lapses.

Always. DOCX or PDF, one piece or a whole project, from the Export links on the piece and project pages. A project export stitches its chapters together in order.

Export works on every plan — free, paid, cancelled, lapsed. There is no plan check on it and there never will be. We will not hold your manuscript hostage.

The Revisions tab lists every version newest first, labelled by where it came from: Pinned by you, Before run (we snapshot automatically before any AI run), or Restored.

You can pin the current state with a label, restore any earlier version, or open a line-by-line comparison between two — which also shows how the rubric scores moved, if both sides were rated.

How far back you can reach depends on plan: 7 days free, 30 on Starter, a year on Plus, unlimited on Pro. Free accounts also keep at most 10 versions per draft.

Versions outside your window are never deleted. They're counted and locked, with a line telling you how many — "kept safe, not deleted" — and upgrading brings them straight back.

A quiet practice tracker under the work table. Set a target in words, lines, stanzas, or drafts, either against a deadline or weekly, and mark up to six planned days off.

Missing a day pauses a streak rather than resetting it — the rule in the code is that a streak never drops to zero without a chance to earn it back. Once a week you get one insight: a name and a number, not a dashboard.

Free on every plan, including free accounts, and it never spends a credit.

• Cmd+Enter / Ctrl+Enter — send a Workshop message.
• The usual editor shortcuts for bold and italic, plus undo and redo.
• Escape — close the scansion popover.

The writing modes are buttons rather than shortcuts: Focus (by paragraph, sentence, or stanza), Typewriter, Gutter, Rhymes, and a theme picker with Light, Dark, and Old School.

There's no command palette yet.

Yes, in a reduced frame. Below tablet width the three panes stack and the piece navigator is replaced by a "Desk" link back to your work table. The account menu stays reachable at every width, so you can always sign out.

Touch targets are sized for fingers, and the work-table actions are ordinary form posts, so they work even if JavaScript doesn't.

Yes. The search box on /desk/ matches titles, project names, and the full body text of your pieces. Search, filters, and sorting all travel together in the URL, so narrowing by kind or re-sorting doesn't throw your search away.

Filter chips — All, Poems, Stories, In a project, Loose, Set aside — count what the current search actually returns, never more.

Both. Every row has a "…" menu with Set aside, Move to, and Delete.

Set aside is reversible archiving — the piece moves to its own filter and the button becomes Restore. A set-aside loose draft also stops counting against the free one-draft cap.

Delete is immediate and permanent, with no confirmation step, and it takes that piece's version history with it. Export first if you might want it back.

No. We do not sell your text, publish it anywhere, or use it to train AI models — ours or anyone else's. The AI providers we send text to exclude API input from training by default under their own terms.

Your work stays yours. We take only the narrow licence needed to store it, process it when you ask for feedback, and display it back to you.

Worth knowing: results from the public tools live at unguessable but publicly reachable URLs. Private Desk drafts are different — those are behind your account, and a draft is only ever visible to someone else if you mint a share link yourself.

See alsoTerms of serviceTrust & data