Most unfinished work stopped because nobody ever counted the hours in it. Pick the shape
of what you want to make, say how many hours a week you really have, and read the answer.
Every assumption in it is yours to change. Your inputs stay here: the counting runs in
this browser, and the hour count is saved in it.
What could you make?
Pick the shape. See how long.
hrs/wk
AI does the first draftEvery word is mine
Schedule
2 sessions coming up
September 2026
11Fri
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI10:00 am Pacific
· next up
19Sat
Practical Propaganda10:00 am Pacific
Make & Do runs Mon-Thu at
9:00 Pacific in between, so there's a room every week. Every one of these days is recorded, and the 22.4 hours
already in the archive open the day you join.
Add on anytime — keeps your current path. One-time purchase, classes yours to keep.
What you take, in order
Five classes. Each one stands on the last.
You learn to work a model before you build anything with one. You build a structure before
you try to move anybody with it. And you price the work before you decide what the work is,
so the idea you commit to is one you can afford to finish. Beside each class is when the
next one sits down, and what you can do at the end of it.
01
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI
Next session11 SeptemberFriday · 10:00 am Pacific
Get a model to do what you actually meant. Also: read a passage for the devices it uses on you.
You leave with
a reusable system prompt and a rubric for your own drafts.
02
The Interactive Fiction Intensive
Come in with an idea, leave with something a stranger can play.
You leave with
a playable branching story, published.
03
Practical Propaganda
Next session19 SeptemberSaturday · 10:00 am Pacific
Name an audience, write something that survives a hostile reading, measure whether it worked.
You leave with
a campaign that holds up under scrutiny, and a way to measure it.
04
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
Your floor rate, your budget, your offering — before you pick the idea.
You leave with
your floor rate, your budget, and an offering priced from both.
05
Founding Federation: Build With Your Heart First
A cohort room and an outbound sequence on a schedule.
You leave with
an outbound sequence on a schedule, and a timeline you have watched with your own eyes.
What you get, and keep
A bench, not a playlist.
The tools that come with this path. Here is what each of them is for.
For the story
Seven pieces of apparatus for the studio day
A companion that runs the day with you, prompt by prompt
A workbook you fill in as the story takes shape
A catalogue of story shapes to pull from
A composition guide for putting those shapes together
A structure atlas for when you want to steal a shape that already works
An authoring toolkit for writing with a model without losing your own voice
A reflection journal, for after — the part most people skip
For the audience
A guided campaign builder, and 8 decks
The campaign builder is one of the guided tools here: it takes you
from “who is this for” to a first touch you can actually send, one screen at a time.
8 decks on framing, platform ecosystems, persona stacks and how a
claim travels
A security primer for people whose work makes them visible
For the money
Two guided benches and exercises
A pricing bench that builds an offering backwards from its floor and holds the
line when a buyer pushes back
A social budget that starts from the three numbers your life costs
exercises across the five classes — 24 of them in
the money week alone
For the weeks in between
Rooms with people in them
Make & Do — Mon-Thu, 9:00 Pacific. You show up with
the thing you are stuck on and leave having moved it.
The standups, every week, on either plan — the reason this is not a
subscription to watching alone
Live hours in every class, with the person teaching it in the room with you —
that is what the $500 plan adds, and you can
come back to a studio day you liked every time it runs
22.4 recorded hours of
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI to rewatch
at 2am when a draft will not behave, and every recording after them
The idea the intensive is built on
Stories are made of five shapes.
Branch, gate, loop, braid, hub. Every interactive story you have played is those five
composed in some order. Assemble one below and watch the arithmetic: passages you have to
write against playthroughs you get back, and the moment where you stop tracking paths and
start tracking what your reader has already done.
The story-shape composer
Click a shape to add it to the end of the structure. Click a piece in the strip to remove it.
Stack up to eight — further than any first story goes — and watch what each one buys you.
Start, then a two-way branch that reconverges, a gate on a decision you recorded earlier
and a loop you may re-enter up to three times, then the end.
11passages you have to write
16distinct playthroughs it yields
2state variables you have to track
1.5playthroughs per passage written
Every shape here is on the syllabus of The Interactive Fiction Intensive, along
with the two capabilities this is really about — transform a linear story into chained
diamonds and operate state so a branching story neither explodes nor rails. The
shape catalogue and the composition guide come with the day.
Two doors down the hall
Two people belong on a different path — and both of them are here.
This path is for the person who wants the work to be theirs at the end of it — your voice, your
structure, your price — with the model doing the parts that were never the point. If that is
the sentence you have been trying to say out loud, you are on the right page.
Come and make something.
The room that carries the weeks in between is Make & Do, Mon-Thu at 9:00 Pacific.
Recordings update as classes run again.
You leave with work, not notes: a playable story, a campaign that holds up, and a rate.
$250 a month opens 22.4 recorded hours,
exercises, tools and the standups every week.
$500 a month adds the room while it runs. Both
renew monthly and you cancel either one yourself. Anything you finish stays yours.