Devlog 001: Where It All Began

Hello, writers!

June was the month Draftmount started taking shape.

The idea was simple: what if writing software felt less like operating heavy machinery and more like sitting down with a notebook you love? I wanted something beautiful and practical, a writing space that doesn’t bury you in buttons and menus you’ll never touch.

So I started building.

Starting with the basics

Most of June went into working out what Draftmount could become. I sketched the foundations of a browser-based writing studio around the things writers need most:

• A clean, comfortable place to write.
• A simple way to organize manuscripts, chapters and ideas.
• Formatting tools that stay out of the way.
• A workspace that feels approachable, even if you’ve never opened writing software before.
• A sensible balance between useful features and needless complexity.

Plenty of sketches and experiments didn’t make the cut, which is exactly what June was for.

A different approach to writing software

One decision came early: Draftmount wasn’t going to be a race to cram in features. Every feature needed a reason to exist, and anything that made writing more complicated without making it better had to be reconsidered.

I also wanted Draftmount to run in a browser, so writers could reach their work without installing anything. That raised its own questions about storage, performance, reliability and keeping people’s work safe, and those questions went on to shape much of the development.

Building it independently

Draftmount is a small, independently developed, queer-owned project. There’s no big development department behind it, just a love of creative tools, a growing pile of ideas, and the stubbornness to turn them into something useful.

This journal will document the process: the decisions, the experiments, and the occasional thing that goes spectacularly wrong. Building software isn’t always pretty, even when you’re trying to make the software itself beautiful.

What’s next?

June was about finding a direction. Next comes turning those early ideas into a working foundation, starting with the editor, project organization and the overall writing experience.

There’s a long road ahead, and I’m excited to see where this little project goes. Thanks for being here at the beginning.

Until the next draft,

The Draftmount Developer