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Beth

@bethdean.bsky.social
99 followers 101 following 25 posts

👹 Your friendly neighborhood lesbian satanist bethdean.com 🏳️‍🌈 Here for art and books preferably queer ⚔️ Swords and necromancy 📚 Making queerspeculativefiction.org 💤 Retired tech ethics person

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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 15h
Oh amazing, I'm so glad it's helpful! I was also tired of firing up Scrivener which...includes your front matter in the word count?! I'm working on adding in cover letter generation, and some other writing plugins. Let me know if you've got wishlist features or run into any snags.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
My friend @chrisbaker1337.bsky.social has a story in Adventitious today, and I laughed from the title all the way to the end. So glad this got a great home. www.adventitious.net/stories/the-...
adventitious.net
The Gorilla Fighters Under Texas by Chris Baker
or: Derek King, Age 8, Shares His Take on the Salvadoran Civil War With Classmates at Sam Houston Elementary Based on a Viewing of ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings on January 19, 1988 (Confe...
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Every year my pal @axeslasher.com curates a Halloween watch list for the entire month of October. This year's site is a blast to use: movies.axeslasher.com
movies.axeslasher.com
Axeslasher's October Horror Watch List
New horror recommendations for every day in October. Find something killer to watch.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Wow I cannot even remember what that was but I'd love to see it! So glad it's been helpful!
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I regret to inform you, I once again have a personal website. I'm feeling nostalgic for the internet of twenty years ago. bethdean.com
bethdean.com
Beth Dean
Writes speculative fiction. Builds tools for writers.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Welllllll I tried. Possibly 3 brain cells now instead of 2?
A small grey scruffy dog with an underbite eluding attempts to put a baseball hat on his head. There is a living room with piles of books in the background. Small scruffy dog with an underbite sitting on the back of a black leather couch (which is definitely not where dogs go) skulking and reluctantly wearing an OTHERSIDE black dad hat. There is a shelf of plants and board games in the background.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I'm working on a story that has multiple timelines, so I've added support for scene labels to my standard manuscript export plugin. community.obsidian.md/plugins/stan...
community.obsidian.md
Standard Manuscript Format Export
Export a story to Shunn's standard manuscript format as a .docx or .rtf, ready to submit.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Immediate buy, and for purposes of science will also test on my dog.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I am foaming at the mouth to play this and made the very dumb choice to start a novella workshop two weeks after it drops. See you all next year I guess? www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/th...
pcgamer.com
The Blood of Dawnwalker review
A horror RPG with novel ideas of its own, even if it doesn’t always have the courage to follow them through.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Next: cover letters that fill themselves in. Then submission tracking, grammar and editing tools with no AI in them, and a way to show an editor that a story was written by a human.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
So the plugin does that part. Title page, contact block, running head, word count, scene breaks, curly quotes. A .docx or an .rtf, because markets disagree about which they take. It never connects to the internet at all.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
It compounds, because markets have their own requirements. Some want DOCX, some refuse it. Some want your name off the manuscript entirely. Every submission meant redoing settings I'd already done once.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Then feedback comes in. You revise the story in Obsidian, and do the whole thing again. Every round, every time.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
The one thing I couldn't do there was get a story into standard manuscript format. So: copy, paste into Scrivener, fight the settings. And the part Scrivener should be best at, the front matter, is where it fought hardest.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I write in Obsidian. It's uncluttered, free, and private. My work is organized the way I want it, in plain files I own, and I can pick a story up on my phone or my laptop without thinking about it.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
One of the first things I noticed was how badly short story writers are served by the tools. Everything is built for novels, or for people who enjoy configuring software. I just wanted to write.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
The longer version: I left tech for writing, and so far I have a very lovely pile of personalized rejections to show for it. And now this plugin.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I left tech to write fiction, got tired of copying stories into Scrivener to format them, and built what I wanted instead: an Obsidian plugin that turns a story into a submission-ready manuscript. Free, private, works on a phone. community.obsidian.md/plugins/stan...
community.obsidian.md
Standard Manuscript Format Export
Export a story to Shunn's standard manuscript format as a .docx or .rtf, ready to submit.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
20 years old and still legible and easy to navigate. The same cannot be said for most personal sites today. I remember it being such a joy to visit!
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Friends don't let friends use Substack.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Dick Vivian provided the soundtrack to one of the happiest periods in my life. I'd just moved to SF and was DJing at El Rio. He'd call me every week with a list of all the records he found me. We'd sit and listen to girl groups and sip Tom Collinses, and I'd leave with a backpack full of memories.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
I finished The Felicity Complex yesterday. It didn't knock me over like Metal From Heaven, but it was weird and fun. August Clarke will be an instant preorder from me until the end of time. hardcover.app/books/the-fe...
hardcover.app
Beth's Review of The Felicity Complex by August Clarke - Hardcover
Read Beth's review of The Felicity Complex by August Clarke on Hardcover
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
My toxic trait is I will never not buy a nice edition of Carmilla.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Local bookstore haul with some local authors.
A stack of books on a wood table from smallest to largest: Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, Queer Horror by Gina Brandolino and Joe Carlough, Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez, Good Writing by Neal Allen and Anne Lamott, and Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders.
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Beth @bethdean.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Back on the doom machine 👋
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