Today is the biggest day for Ellipsus since we launched in 2023... 👀
Back then, we began building Ellipsus out of a simple belief: writers deserve a place to create, collaborate, and share their work without handing over their words, their data, or their creative process to bad actors and Big Tech—a promise that matters now, more than ever.
Nearly 600k writers and counting are writing on Ellipsus because of this promise. We see everyday how writers are rejecting Big Tech's data mining model in favor of tools that respect user privacy and reflect our values.
We’re a small full-time team building, maintaining, supporting, and improving the tool every day. And to keep doing that sustainably—without compromising the promises that brought people here—we’re introducing Ellipsus Plus.
Plus is a set of optional features on top of free Ellipsus, designed to help fund the continued development of Ellipsus for everyone, free and paid; while helping us stay independent, ad-free, and working to improve the tool well into the future.
That means the Ellipsus you know is staying free: you can keep writing with unlimited documents, drafts, collaborators, and core features. Free Ellipsus will continue to receive updates, improvements, and new features too, including major work already planned (like offline syncing and native apps).
Plus features have been designed alongside community feedback, our pricing shaped by our users around what felt fair and sustainable.
Every Plus subscription leads to ultimate ownership of the tool. Not metaphorical ownership, but real ownership, including all future updates to the Plus plan. No endless subscriptions. Once you’ve paid, it’s yours. Really.
Our introductory Plus features are designed to be fun, creative, practical, and help you get the most out of the tool! We really hope you enjoy them.
Here’s a quick overview:
Custom themes
Make your writing space feel like home with custom themes! Use any colors, gradients, images, or .gifs you love. Share with friends and readers. The choices are infinite.
Writing Insights
See insights into your writing process and spot patterns faster across ten AI-free metrics—like vocabulary diversity, sentence length, sentence rhythm, word frequency, and more. Writing insights are opt-in only, and run on local data, so your text never leaves the editor.
Customizable Snippets
We all love snippets! Now you can give your words an extra personal touch. Customize your snippets with media backgrounds (GIFs, images), fonts, text colors, and custom themes—you can even add byline credits for authors and characters!
Emboss
Emboss is our AI-free proof-of-work layer for human writing. Show your readers the time, labor, and love that went into your work. Instead of relying on unreliable “AI-powered” “verifiers” that judge a piece after the fact, share your writing journey, with authorship metrics that help inspire trust. You can also show how your work evolved with snapshots of your version history. Emboss is fully opt-in.
We hope you’re as excited about Plus as we are! Try Plus free for 7 days, no payment required. You can read more (and sign up!) on our Plus page.
Again, there’s tons more to come, and we can’t wait to build it for you. Free or paid, Ellipsus is going to keep getting better. Thank you for your support.
Have questions about Plus? We’re hosting an “Ask the Team” doc where we’ll be answering your burning questions. Please make comments there!
Now please, go forth and explore!
Heyy, asking about your alternative master list? : ) Xx
Oh you mean my patreon masterlist on google docs?
If you want full access I just need your Patreon username and an email address and I'll share access. If you're not on Patreon and don't want to go through Patreon I can accept payment through Zelle, PayPal, and Venmo (or through this link on ko-fi).
hey. if someone tries to smear you on the internet for something asinine, what you need to do is block every single person engaging with the post and remind yourself that absolutely under no circumstances are you obligated to draft a PR response defending some out-of-context screenshot or kink fanfiction or thing you said when you were 15 or whatever put your blood in the water. you are not a public figure or a brand. you do not have to respond to something if you know in your heart it is bullshit.
If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
Oh and I want to fight all the Gen Z kids who are like ‘teehee, we’ll just do lavender marriages instead!’ Some of us are adults who want equal rights and protections under the law of our land.
Yeah, we wanted legal marriages because your spouse's horrid family could show up, get you kicked out of the hospital, steal all of their stuff, and there was nothing you could do about it.
When my wife went in for surgery before we got married, it was me and her horrifically homophobic mother in the surgery center waiting room and I knew without a doubt that if anything went wrong, I would be expected to leave without any access to her belongings, the pictures of us on her phone, or the funeral itself, and the obituary would not mention me or our relationship at all.
And that was after almost a decade of marriage equality! The fear and anxiety leading up to that surgery and the recovery process after reinforced for me just how important marriage can be. It’s a form of self-determination.
Do you guys remember how kidnap fantasies were popular on wattpad because young girls and queer teens were both made to feel shame at the thought of their own sexualities, so the fantasy of being kidnapped totally against their will was a way for them to engage with a romantic or sexual fantasy without feeling morally in the wrong for doing so? Added bonus that the fantasy involved being whisked away from repressive environments like home or school, right?
Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:
“I TOTALLY love my wife and would never do anything that an upstanding Good Straight Working Man wouldn’t do but oh nooo, big strong man with broad back and strong enough arms to carry me back to bed like a princess trapped me and claimed me as his, completely against my will 👉👈 But he protects me against the bad evil sexual women (who I assure you, I am TOTALLY sexually attracted to, as any straight man with a choice would be) but trust me, I do NOT want ANY of this. What’s that? The Count is not capable of feeling love? Would be a shame if I had the special ability to change tha-”
This is also the fantasy behind all those old bodice-ripper romances that people today like to mock or call problematic, by the way.
“Oh, my next forty years are going to consist of nothing but washing dishes and keeping house and bearing children for the disdainful man I married right out of high school because my parents said college was for men and I had no other obvious life path open to me? What if a pirate captain thought I was worth stealing away from it all? [what if I ran away but no-one could blame me for leaving]?”
#I read an article a long time ago about a woman who was raised in an incredibly repressive conservative christian community#where all that mattered was purity and virginity etc #She talked about how for a long time rape fantasies were the only way she could derive any pleasure from sex #because she couldn’t feel safe exploring the idea of wanting sex #it wasn’t really ABOUT rape or eroticizing assault or whatever #it was about creating a scenario where she was free from the shame associated with wanting #i think this is true of a lot of icky-seeming stuff in romance and erotica #it’s an imaginary scenario where nothing you don’t really want actually happens #but you can’t be blamed or feel guilty for it #you didn’t do anything wrong#anyway that article changed my perspective a lot #i think there’s also something to be said for people who have felt ugly and undesirable their whole lives #enjoying fictional scenarios where a hot alpha werewolf or whatever is so attracted to them he ‘cant help himself’ or whatever #because it can also be really shameful to want to be desired #when you feel like youre ugly and gross ( @headspace-hotel )
Gringos have so much piracy anxiety like who would have thought spending my formative years getting free shit from anywhere because games were practically unaffordable would make me a normal person
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction - subgenres of science fiction that are set in a time period where the earth as we know it is coming to an end. Post-apocalyptic novels almost always take place in the future, although some describe the end of past civilizations that no longer exist.
Common Themes in Apocalyptic Fiction
The themes that govern apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic books tend to involve circumstances that lead to mass unrest, societal breakdown, and widespread death. These include:
Climate change
Nuclear holocaust
Medical pandemic
The rise of sentient robots
The destruction of a major city
Endless war
A fascist government engaged in mind control
In novels with these themes, a main character is usually tasked with navigating the deathtraps of a world afflicted by the prevailing apocalyptic conditions.
Origins of Apocalyptic Fiction
Apocalyptic literature has existed for millenia.
Major western religions ranging from Christianity, Islam, and Judaism contain multiple tales of a civilization or locale reaching its end.
The stories of the garden of Eden, Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the book of Revelation all contain apocalyptic themes.
The ancient Mesopatamian epic of Gilgamesh is also concerned with the end of the known world.
Apocalyptic stories of Babylon have been written all the way from antiquity to the present.
The Romantic and Gothic authors of the early 19th century explored apocalyptic themes, perhaps most famously in Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826).
Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" centers on disembodied souls discussing the recent destruction of the Earth.
In the 20th century, the apocalyptic genre grew in the wake of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War nuclear arms race.
Novelists, essayists, and filmmakers conjured many an apocalyptic world that offered everything from zombie wars to a desolate post-nuclear wastelands.
Examples of Apocalyptic Fiction
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have given rise to what many consider the best post-apocalyptic books and post-apocalyptic stories ever written. These books are often also cross-categorized as dystopian fiction and speculative fiction. Some also fit the young adult subgenre. Here are some highlights of the genre, divided by theme:
Post-Disaster Wastelands
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Stand by Stephen King
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
One Second After by William R. Forstchen
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Swan Song by Robert McCammon
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
The Postman by David Brin
"A Boy and His Dog" by Harlan Ellison
Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, a trilogy by Margaret Atwood
The Mad Max film series by James McCausland and George Miller
Nature Gone Awry
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
The Maze Runner trilogy by James Dashner
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
Zombie Apocalypse
World War Z by Max Brooks
The Walking Dead, a graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard
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