I have a creative writing site that lets authors write branching fiction novels together. It's stupid fun, we have Discord/Zoom writing events Sunday nights where we try to write chapters together (usually around 500 words) and read them to each other. It existed years ago and made some advertising money, and then I shut it down because of spam problems (since solved). I brought it back to live because of COVID. I'm petrified to launch the site live because it's on a 10-year-old php stack, the website design looks like it's from the late 90's, and my IP policy sucks (on submit, I own all copyrights, my current authors don't mind but it's always bugged me) and I have no other compliance things going on like coppa or privacy policies because I don't know how to do that and do I really want to hire a lawyer if I have no ambitious revenue plans? If I keep advertising turned off (my preference), my only other current revenue path is publishing books when all threads get concluded, and the writing quality, while better than most similar sites, is not really publication quality. So for now it just sits behind an apache password prompt and gets very little traffic, and that's ok for now. Although if anyone here likes the idea of writing silly creative writing stories on a private website, feel free to message me. Main story right now is a girl who is invited to mage school except she accidentally kills her boyfriend. Well, that's just one thread. In another thread he's a firemoose.
Absolutely. I discourage cyclic, but dag is ok. It can be hard to write a downstream chapter (and keep the plot consistent) when there are two upstream paths, so we don't do it a lot, but we have a few examples. I think in our current story of about 110 chapters, we have three crosslinks, and two of them have a major impact on the story. I wrote a pretty snazzy react/cytoscape thing to visualize and explore the maps.
