Traveler's Pen

vorfelan · August 30, 2026, 3:44pm

Hello fellow travelers,

Help me with feedback and ideas, please.

For the staff, if this violate any kind of rules regarding the forum, please remove the post.

My name is Michael and I’m a software engineer and novice writer. I’ve tried tons of softwares for writing, and my favorite so far is Obsidian. But even so, there are things bugging me, making me wish for something else.

So I decided to create my own writing app. Built using Tauri V2

The angular principles:

It needs to be fast and multi-platform.
It needs to be beautiful in UI and UX.
It needs to be functional and clean.
It’s totally focused for writing novels, rather than generalist.

It’s still in early development and I still don’t have yet a build to share.

What is the reason for it? I want to support my family and also try to exit as software engineer and become full-time writer.

Will it be free? I’m still thinking about the business model. Surely it will have free trial without requiring a credit-card to launch. I can guarantee it will not be expensive.

Features:

Backup & Snapshots (cloud)
Offline first.
Free spellchecker, it utilizes Harper (I’m still thinking about expanding it).
Free dictionaries to download, it uses kaikki dictionaries.
Revision mode, to have the feeling of editing.
Focus mode.
Versions (create as many draft versions you want)
Outline and easy access to the outline in the book chapter. You write the outlines for X chapter, similar to a screenwriting app does, and you can toggle on/off when writing in the chapter itself.
Codex/Research
LitRPG Syntaxes (track/organize)
Entity/semantic/embedding model/graph linking using GLiNER and similar systems. Local, offline and free. Think about it as local LLM to populate the codex, and power the search system.
Goal/stats
Focus timer
Noise ambience
Formatter for publishing.

Potential subscription model of the app:

Publish and launch your own website as author’s website or book’s website.
Linking to Patreon/subscriptions.
Preview of chapters/and or/unlock with sign-up/subscription.
Newsletter
Analytics
Reviewer. Send a chapter’s link with the same Review mode for a reviewer to read and give suggestions. Password to access.

What do I seek here? Feedbacks and perhaps to showcase something that it will interest you.

All the mood/themes images will come from Artvee, public domain usage, perhaps with some photoshopping to set the mood correctly: https://artvee.com/

The following will be a bit of ‘mess’. It has the floating panel of outline, grammar.

Vincent_Vincent · August 30, 2026, 6:57pm

You let me know once you have a forum.

I’ll post screenshots of an unfinished app and claim it’ll be cheaper than yours.

. . . . . . .

This isn’t awkward…

(You asked for feedback.)

Develop some ethics.

(You asked for ideas.)

. . . . . . . .

Note that I am not part of Literature and Latte’s staff. .. Just a simple (and very happy) user with an opinion.

vorfelan · August 30, 2026, 8:45pm

Makes sense. It was really bad of my part to do so. Merely a misunderstanding of mine regarding this area of the forum (I have see some other posts promoting, surely not directly mentioning price and comparing the price, but mentioning the product itself).

Good feedback and thanks for replying me.

Dain · August 31, 2026, 2:32am

Ever hear the old expression, “Dance with the one that brought you”?

I get that you are trying to find a better way for YOUR creative path. Others may share that path, but mostly I expect they do not. Just like those that swear by Microslop Word don’t understand Scrivener or Obsidian.

Coke v Pepsi v Doctor Pepper… It’s a about style and choice. Just remember the important (and forgotten) part of the famous customer service mantra… “In the matters of style, the customer is always right.”

I’ve wanted something like this in Scrivener for a while now. Send a project to a beta reader or an editor, allow them to mark it up as they want, I can see the edits but the original is locked and preserved. In my deepest depths of selfishness I want a dedicated app. Something with none of the compile functions, few if any of the advanced formatting options, and aside from needing them to evaluate styles in the manuscript or check out the corkboard to update synopses, etc al, very few things that do not correspond to reading content, exploring organization, add comments, and mark corrections.

The mood/themes idea is underwhelming for me personally. If you poke about on the forums here there are a couple of fairly active threads showcasing all sorts of themes for Scrivener and many of them can look the way your example screengrabs do. Then again, I never mastered using the styles functions during first pass writing either. Okay, I’ll come out and say it, I could stand for a 80x25 plaintext version of Scrivener at times. Though usually when I go that direction in dreamland, I’m seeking a proper license to build the C64U version I’d want to have.

So, aside from pretty themes and a different take on how the software applies your words to the project, what else are you trying to do?

alexxtholden · August 31, 2026, 4:02pm

I actually use Betabooks. It does a lot of this stuff and it’s how I work with my beta readers. It allows for version disparity and in-line notes. You can use it to build out a novel chapter by chapter and respond to feedback.

vorfelan · August 31, 2026, 6:23pm

Valuable feedback, thank you.
I guess it tend more for matters of taste. I’m betting that my taste and vision will work so far as to make this product a reality.

Regarding the mood/themes, there are simple versions, somo even stripped down to ‘terminal’ feeling. Moreso for the writer itself to have a feeling of what he wants, but I get your point.

Now, the biggest point you’ve asked about.

I understand that, software for writers, writing apps, that alone isn’t enough nowadays. I mean, there are tons of options (of course, it still does exist a market share for it, for instance, Deckle). But my approach is to try to have ‘much more’ without being overwhelming to have it.

This idea of mine isn’t new and I have been working on the app and platform for about two years in my spare time by now. I have a sample of what it could be, and I can share it here.

I have this silly ambition of having a writing app that blends a little bit of coding syntax, algorithms, without messing and being crafted into a trick learning curve experience of: a better way to organize the book, worldbuilding and to showcase the book.

For instance, easy way to display your book to anyone, with just a simple click and you can configure your own domain.

Example (from a fellow writer I asked to test): https://destiny.travelerspentales.com/

Now, for the example of how it can help the writer. This is a workflow I made, it uses LLM, in this case, it uses a local LLM, but it has the option to utilize a paid one.

It analyzes the chapters horizontally and vertically (chapter 1 with 2; chapter 1 across N chapters you want to).

What is the deal? Purely tool-usage of how everything relates. In essence, write your long-series format without worrying too much about all the details and how long it is. Of course, in the end, it still merely a tool and it depends entirely on the person using it. In any case, isn’t generative in the sense of trying to generate something else from the chapters it has analyzed. In truth, it works on ‘temperature 0.1’, in LLM terms, ‘zero freedom’. It is purely and only about your chapters.

So as final answer of what do I seek: a gamble of ‘Tolkien-ambition’ regarding worldbuilding, with a modern touch of the current technology, without being overwhelming to use and focusing purely as tool to help me write consistently.

Just few images (it has many tools).

kewms · September 1, 2026, 11:55pm

Friendly moderator here.

While we don’t object to people discussing other writing apps here, this is not a place for extensive promotional materials. If you have a lot of screenshots to share, your own site is the best place to share them.