Many years ago, WFNB member Dusty Phillips was a serious practitioner of Tai Chi living in Toronto. He remembers that his instructor tried to convince him to settle in the city, saying that it was important to “set roots.”
“I thought that was an odd piece of advice,” Dusty says, “but it stuck with me.” Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Dusty moved around a lot as an adult to work at various positions. When travelling through the Maritimes in 2009, he found the region to be a hidden gem. “It was this very intuitive sense. I feel like I was connected to New Brunswick specifically, and I don’t know why.”
Eight years later, Dusty and his wife Jen, an American citizen, moved to New Brunswick from Seattle in early 2017. “Now, what I like to do here is plant trees, which is a very New Brunswick thing to do! I am literally setting roots.”
Now based in the Saint John region, Dusty is a software developer whose experience in the tech industry ranges from working for large organizations like World Intellectual Property Organization (United Nations), and Facebook, to a host of small start-ups. Through the course of his career, he’s written three nonfiction books on programming languages ((Python Object-Oriented Programming, Packt Pub Ltd., 2009, now in its fourth edition, Creating Apps in Kivy, O’Reilly Media, 2014, and Lazy VIM for Ambitious Developers, 2024).
But it was through the process of writing his first novel that he realized the need for an application like Fablehenge, which released in June, 2024. What began as a hobby project during the pandemic has developed into a subscription-based writing platform that provides better tools to keep worldbuilding notes organized and close at hand.
The idea began when Dusty’s wife Jen, a former editor, reviewed his novel manuscript and listened to him complain about how troublesome it was to keep track of all the story elements. “She said, ‘it sounds like you need Facebook for your book.’ And I was like, that’s exactly what I need!’ So that is what we tried to build with Fablehenge.”
Up until the creation of Fablehenge, there were only three digital tools for writers on the market: Google Docs, Microsoft Word or Scrivener, the latter being the only one dedicated to organizing a story. “But I am personally more of a discovery writer—a pantser than a plotter,” Dusty said, “and I found that Scrivener was not organizing me in the way that I wanted it to.”
He wanted to create a product that was as easy to use as social media and would allow a writer to bridge the gap between discovery writing and the process of plotting or outlining. It needed to make it easy to switch back and forth between those two writing styles. “Every outliner and every discovery writer will tell you, ‘Yes indeed, sometimes I switch to the other style. I outline my plot and discovery-write my characters,’ is a common phrase.”
Fablehenge supports the full spectrum of writing styles, whether a plotter begins from the start with an outline, or discovery writers who’d rather begin right in the main document. “Who just start writing…the most pantsiest way to do it,” he laughs.
But eventually, even pantsers need to get organized. “We’ve made it very easy to split your existing document into scenes, and this is the basic unit where Fablehenge is really helpful. It allows you to attach—we call them tags, like a tag in a social network – to each scene.”
Using these tags, you can easily see all scenes that a character inhabits, or the scenes connected to a subplot, etc. And you can tag characters to a scene before the scene has even been written.
Instead of character sheets, writers have the option to freestyle it or ask themselves some prefilled prompts, so that they can be referred to as the writing progresses. Everything is designed to not interrupt the writer’s productivity. “If you stop in mid-sentence and wonder, ‘what colour was this person’s eyes again?’ that information can be quickly located without having to switch to a different screen or anything.” More detailed information is only a couple of clicks away.
“We also have drag and drop reordering, to make it easy to move your scenes around either before or after. We didn’t want to completely emulate the Scrivener card cube because it’s a little bit too complicated, so we went for something simpler.”
Dusty and Jen launched the “alpha” version (first days of software testing) in 2021, and with some dedicated user feedback, continued to develop this subscription product until its production release in June 2024. Since then, they’ve been ramping up marketing and are continuing to refine the product. You can sign up for a free version just to try it out, and if you’re sold on it, there are a couple of paid subscription packages that offer a few more features.
The user list so far is modest but growing, and it’s exciting for them to notice when an anonymous account switches to a logged in account. They have local users, but there are also pockets of users in the U.S. and Australia.
New features they’ve just started working on include a writing group concept – where users can share scenes and chat about them. The application is not fully internationalized yet, so they haven’t been able to support French speaking or other language users, but that is a priority.
So for now, Fablehenge is looking for dedicated authors who will try out the application and talk about it. “Our ambition would be that someone would say in the acknowledgement section of their bestseller that we helped contribute to that,” Dusty says. “That would be a delightful thing to read. I would pay for that book, whatever it was about!”
