Scriborium

I write a column. So do you, probably, or you wouldn’t be here. And if you write one that runs in more than one place, you already know the part nobody warns you about: the writing is the easy bit.

The hard bit is everything around it. You finish a piece and send it to the newspaper. A slightly different version goes to the trade publication, because their house style hates your semicolons. A third version lives on your own site, posted a week later so you don’t annoy anyone. Somewhere in there an aggregator picks it up, and you’re fairly sure you said yes to that, but you’d have to go digging through email to be certain.

Then someone asks, “Can I reprint the one about X?” and you have to work out whether you still own it. Did the rights revert? When? Which version were they even asking for? You go looking, and the answer is in four places at once, none of them talking to each other.

That mess is what I’m building Scriborium to clean up.

Where the whole column lives

Scriborium is a set of Gutenberg blocks that treat a column as a thing with a life, not a single post that goes out once and disappears. You track each piece through its publication run: which outlet ran it, on what date, in which version. You keep the relationship between your original draft and the adapted ones, so the semicolon edit doesn’t get lost. And you can see, at a glance, which pieces have come back to you, rights and all.

The specifics are still taking shape. I’d rather build the parts writers actually reach for than ship a long feature list that looks impressive and helps no one.

Why the odd name

A scriptorium was the room in a medieval monastery where monks copied manuscripts by hand, one careful page at a time. Scriborium is my nod to that: same patient copying work, fewer candles, no vow of silence. You’re still making copies of your writing and sending them out into the world. I just think you deserve a better desk for it.

Where things stand

In progress. Nothing to download yet, and no date I’m willing to promise, because I’ve read enough broken roadmaps to not add to the pile.

If you want to watch it come together, the work is happening in the open: https://github.com/thisismyurl/scriborium

Star it, or just check back. When the room’s ready, you’ll be the first I tell.