Getting Noticed

Helium.com is a site where writers can submit articles. Members rate the posted articles in what is basically, a writing competition. There's a chance for some payment, either from sharing ad revenues from the site or through the site's marketplace where writers and publishers can find each other. No one's likely to make a living at this site, but for newbies, it can be good exposure.

Extreme Collaboration

While I'm no longer working on my science fiction book(s) with a collaborator, I still write and self-publish spy stories with friends and sending files back and forth is a pain, especially since one friend is in Canada and her WordPerfect is the Canadian version with its own idea of proper spelling. So, I was eager to try Writely, but Google bought it before I could sign up, so now the three of us are trying Google's Documents and Spreadsheets. There are bugs in the thing, but so far, it beats writing in IMs.

We've done dialogue in IM, then copied into WP, then the one of us who has the pov character for the scene fleshed it out and finished the scene draft. Now, we're trying online writing. We can be working on the same file at the same time. Our experimentation hasn't gotten too far yet, but so far, so good. Worth trying if you write with someone else. If there's another free online word processor, I'd like to know about it.