RedQuillers,

Here’s a roundup of what we’ve shipped, what we fixed, and what we’re looking at next.

This week includes big upcoming feature launches next Wednesday that Premium RQ subscribers can preview, as well as fixes for several visible frustrations you’ve reported, including streaks resetting, paragraph tools corrupting text, and the header disappearing after writing.

Just to let you know: writing reliability work is still ongoing ambiently. More chapters are now being handled through faster routes that have been failing less often, and some writes now try an additional service first when the usual path is slow. We’re continuing to monitor both reliability and writing quality, but the major prose issues should have been fixed (some recent problems with prose didn't seem to be prose per se, so we appreciate any really specific examples you can find if you do- and to share them here since we're actively looking at all the examples).

🚢 What's shipped

• 💥 Premium early access is live. Premium members can turn on Early access from the account menu to preview three larger updates:
  • A simpler, prompt-first Create screen
  • A redesigned Reader, including Fork and Roleplay from any paragraph
  • Explore, a new Roleplay experience where you step into the story as a character and choose what you Do, Say, or want to happen
• 💥 Components now have likes and forks. You can heart a component and find it later in Library → Liked, or fork one to create your own private, editable copy
• 💥 User blocking is live. You can block someone from their profile, comments, stories, components, or chat messages. Their content and notifications disappear for you, and they can no longer comment on your work, follow you, or invite you to collaborate
• Component pages have also been redesigned with clearer details, AI instructions, newest comments first, related components, and public stories using that component
• Component creators can now receive notifications for new comments and when their public components reach use or favorite milestones
• The home page is less crowded for new users. The starter checklist is now the slimmer Prologue Quest, and the weekly contest has moved into the main slider

🐛 Bugs fixed

• Streaks should no longer reset when you didn’t actually skip a day. Writing while low on Quills now counts, one missed day pauses instead of breaking the streak, and a reset falls back to the last milestone reached instead of the last reward claimed. Previously lost streaks are not automatically restored
• Paragraph Extend and Rewrite no longer drop letters or move blank lines after Accept and Save. They should also understand that more text follows the paragraph instead of writing as though the chapter ends there
• On desktop, the header, sidebar, and Quill count no longer stay hidden after a chapter finishes
• Fixed the crash that showed an “error 500” page, especially on contest pages. Older open tabs may reload once after an update instead
• Signing up or logging in now returns you to the story or page you were viewing instead of dropping you on Home
• Discover → Components no longer dims the entire grid while loading more, and the mobile grid should stay within the screen

🔭 What's ahead

• The new Create, Reader, and Explore experiences will roll out more broadly after early-access testing. We are planning to release these next Wednesday. Please share with us feedback if you end up trying these experiences as a Premium user.
• We know universal story settings can still be missed by some paragraph tools. A fix is being retested; it is not live yet
• Mobile apps: Android is release-ready but not live in the store yet. The latest iOS update remains delayed in App Review with potential for full rejection. We’ll announce launches once they’re confirmed

💬 Community

• RedQuill Inktober is live here on r/redquill. Every day in October has an official Inktober word. Use it in a new or existing public story, then comment in that day’s Reddit thread with the story link and a screenshot. Each day you participate earns 1 free Advanced Write, up to 31 total. Rewards are credited weekly. Full rules here
• We’re also working on a Spooky-themed story contest for October. More details soon!

❤️ 🪶 Quill on!

I've been looking at other options. These are the ones I have looked at so far:

SillyTavern/Open WebUI

>Technical knowledge required: Moderately high
Cost: variable, but generally very low
Ease of generation: moderate-high

>These are not really substitutes for Red Quill, but they give us a baseline to work from. Using these, you run a piece of open-source software on your PC, and then select an AI model from a provider (I use openrouter.ai). Now, for generally chatting, it works fine. For generating stories, it will be bumpier. RQ provides a lot of features for you that you'd have to set up yourself. So why would you do this? Because, with that work and the right model selected you can get your costs down to pennies per month. Obviously, the larger AI models (particularly Claude et al) will be much more expensive. This has a high initial setup curve, but then should be largely simple to use.

NovelAI

>Technical knowledge required: moderate learning curve
Cost: low to high($10/$15/$25 per month)
Ease of generation: should be very easy

>I have not used it yet, but it looks like it has some nice features. As far as generations, it's difficult to tell from the outside how well it will handle continuity. It gives a sort of guide for token limits, but because of the lorebook-like features it's hard to know what those limits mean in reality. Also handles image generation, though possibly only anime-style. Also, importantly, NovelAI has their own AI that they host, so they tune it themselves and are not beholden to an external company like most are (including RQ).

SmutWriter

>Technical knowledge required: moderate learning curve
Cost: low to very high ($8/$25/$42 per month)
Ease of generation: should be very easy

>This seems to be a sort of secondary portal to a site called "WriteWithPaige", Paige being (one of) the site's AI assistant. It claims to be able to handle NSFW fiction just fine, with the normal exceptions. However, it looks like you have to have your own AI key, so that's back down at the SillyTavern/WebUI level. What this means is that, using your own key, you are paying directly for your AI use, in addition to what you pay SmutWriter/WriteWithPaige. Their other monthly tiers are $8 (which seems like a good set of tools to me), $25 (which is a lot more tools than I think most of us would need), and $42 (insanity--you don't need this).

SpicyWriter

>Technical knowledge required: moderate learning curve
Cost: moderate ($20 per month)
Ease of generation: should be very easy

>SpicyWriter uses big models, but the site team, much like RQ's team, has done a lot of work to "jailbreak" the models to get them to write spicy content. Jailbreaking is an art form, not a science, and it is never done. Every time a new update to a model is released, things will get weird (as we've seen with RQ) while the site adjusts to the new system. That said, based on the outside pages it looks like the team there is open and direct, so you should at least know what is going on. It looks like it has a reasonable set of tools, but not as complete as SmutWriter, NovelAI, or Novelcrafter

>Novelcrafter .ai

>Technical knowledge required: mild learning curve
Cost: low to moderate ($5/$9/$15/$22 per month)
Ease of generation: should be very easy

>Novelcrafter also requires a key, so in addition to what you are paying them, you also have to pay directly for your AI usage. What they bring to the table is what seems to be possibly the best-in-class tools for managing books. They have other features "planned", but you, me, the Red Quill team, and Robert Burns all know about the best laid plans, right? So I wouldn't count those as features until they are solid and reliable. Right now, they are essentially vaporware. Still, it seems to be very good at what it does. at the very least it's slightly cheaper than SmutWriter, so there's that.

That's what I've found so far. If you have any questions or experience with any of these options, please post it here and we can update this thread as we go. I will likely post any results on therubric.wiki

https://preview.redd.it/b3o9znq2lslh1.png?width=921&format=png&auto=webp&s=861c03a63f7319517419fadf6b19be546898f678

https://preview.redd.it/51fhsqkj7llh1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=64d41bdb6f63a4fb80e46b3da4dcfb2a7ac727f0

Over at The Rubric (the unofficial Red Quill wiki), I have added a URL shortener, named "Penknife" for people to use for linking to their stories. It will only allow addresses from therubric or Red Quill, so no using it to link to your Lemon Party fansite. As you can see, it will also generate a QR code. I hope it proves useful to some folks.

I don't know how much work it would be, so it might not even be worth the trouble, but it would be super handy to be able to keep the last chapter of a story hidden until you are ready. Not individually publish chapters, just the last one.

When writing a longer story, after I generate a new chapter I need to edit it, and I worry that people will read it before I have done that. I realize there is a certain assumed level of ego here--that anyone is waiting with bated breath for my next brilliant piece of (AI generated) prose, but still.

WTFL;DR: It’s complicated

 EDIT: At the outset, let me be clear that this post isn't diagnosing RQ's business plan, operations, or anything else. It is laying out how I believe the system works to provide some information for people who seem to be very confused about it all. That's it.

People seem to be confused about how the system works, or even about how AI works in general. I am not an expert, and I don't have any special, secret knowledge. This is just information I have put together based on my own poking around with AI at home and at work. But I thought I'd put it out here to clarify things some and also get feedback to refine the understanding. Information wants to be free, after all.

Some base assumptions to begin with (these are good rules to live by, btw):

Occam’s Razor: All things being equal, the explanation that requires the least amount of unproven information should be preferred.

Hanlon’s Law: Do not assume malice when ignorance is sufficient.

 ----------------

And now:

Red Quill, the Company

Let's begin with Red Quill the company first. I suspect it began sort of like this:

“Hey—tell me a dirty story.”

“Oh, you know I’m no good at that.” 

“Wouldn’t it be great if we had a computer that could make them for us and then we could just focus on being sexier?”

It is likely not a large, multi-national company. As far as I can tell, it was started by probably 2 people, and while they have almost certainly added a few employees, I imagine it stays pretty lean. They are not a multi-million dollar company raking in money hand over fist. This isn't Google. They are probably just like us, except they have less time to read sexy stories because they have to maintain the website.

redquill, the website

The website is hosted by a company called Railway, which is sort of like a version of Squarespace for companies instead of individuals. RQ is probably limited in selection of providers because of the nature of the business. When I was trying to set up the wiki (therubric.wiki, pardon the plug) I had difficulty finding a host because I couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be adult material on the wiki. Fandom wouldn't allow it, and even Miraheze (created as a host specifically for niche wikis) wouldn't accept it because of the adult nature.

The AI

Red Quill does not have a huge, multibillion-dollar data center of their own that hosts their own AI. They pay (several) other companies to access a large AI. It looks like they are using DeepSeek, which is a pretty good choice from what I know. The problem with a lot of big models is that they are more censored and repressed than an 80-year-old Orthodox Catholic Nun sitting in the first pew. We've all had experiences with this with even this AI, not to mention others. DeepSeek is more relaxed about the guardrails on the whole. There are ways to cut these guardrails out (called "abliberating"), but that means hosting the model yourself, and generally means using a smaller (ie. less capable) model to begin with.

The big thing to take away from this is that the RQ staff have absolutely no control of the AI, what it says, or how it operates. They cannot "reprogram" the AI, cannot alter it, cannot make changes to it. They can, however, influence it.

Another thing to remember, and this is a tricky one because we've all been trained for decades on "garbage in, garbage out", is this: AI doesn't work like a normal computer program. A normal program takes the input, applies the instructions, and gives you the answer. Every time. Same input, same output.

AI doesn't do that. The rules for how an AI works (and this is serious) are closer to the way that stars and planets are affected by gravity than they are to traditional computer code. Think of Ian Malcolm placing a drop of water on Ellie Sadler's hand to demonstrate Chaos Theory. The same input will not always get the same output. This is an important bit to keep in mind. It's just part of what makes AI so frustrating and so incredible.

The Operation (ie. How Your Dirty Stuff Gets Made)

So you want to make a chapter. You type in your prompt, a computer runs it through a program and generates the text, right?

Ooooooh, no. If only.

Here is the chain as I can put it together:

[Begin RQ wrapper/jailbreak] + [writer selection] + (your universal components) + (your selected components) + (your lorebook) + <your prompt> [End RQ wrapper]

In terms of companies, it would look roughly like this:

<your device> -> your ISP -> Railway (for the website) -> internal RQ website programming -> router -> inference provider -> gateway -> LLM

Let's look at each of these in turn as we build the big prompt that is sent to the remote AI.

RQ Wrapper/Jailbreak Begin and End

Everything we send is likely wrapped in a set of instructions to at the least tell the AI how to generally behave and what to do. This may or may not contain a "jailbreak", which is a set of statements to try to get around the guardrails and censors. I would imagine that the jailbreak, if it exists, is fairly minimal, or we'd get a lot more failures.

This is the first possible point of failure. If the company that owns the AI model (not the host, which is possibly/likely a different company) changes the model, then everything will get weird and have to be reconfigured. This is probably what happened at the beginning of August--DeepSeek released a new model, and some changes that they made to the gateway seemed to have an impact on older models. I was using DeepSeek 3.2 privately at the time, and it started behaving very strangely at the same time. It's feeling much better now.

Writer Selection

The writers seem to be preconfigured at the host/model level, because I've seen other services use an "Ember" model. So (best case) this might be just a simple Standard/Ember/Ink selection. If not, then there will be a set of instructions here to tell the AI how to write. So why not put in an instruction that says "Keep track of continuity"? Well, because the people who run RQ actually want to have a good service, we can be sure that something like this exists.

On top of that, AI has a "setting" often called "temperature" that describes how wild the AI can get in trying to fulfill its instructions. It runs from 0.0 to 1.0 (because computer nerds love that kind of thing). At 0.0 you get something like a "Full House" episode: staid, boring as hell, so predictable that you could probably recite a new episode along with the actors. 1.0 is like a coked up teenager writing a new episode for "The Young Ones" after 6 espressos--anything can, and probably will happen. The recent problems with standard, where it's just putting out gibberish is possibly due to the temperature setting getting out of whack somewhere, moving from Grecian Ode poems to avant-garde dadaism. Even so, if you take some of that gibberish and feed it to a big model (like Gemini), it can give you some great insight because Gemini (for example) will be able to see what the AI was trying to do.

Universal Components

Next comes the universal components you have assigned to your account. These are found under the individual menu (clicking on your icon in the upper right-hand corner on a computer). It takes the text from all these and just jams it all into the prompt.

Selected components

I'm not sure if these come before or after the Lorebook, but I'm not sure how much it matters in the grand scheme of things. At any rate, it takes the text from all the components you've added in this chapter, plus the ones that were there before, and tacks that onto the end of the prompt we're building. You can see that it's getting pretty big already.

Lorebook

Next comes the Lorebook, which includes summaries of all the preceding chapters, as well as the descriptions of your characters and components (old ones). This is all jammed onto the end of the prompt.

Your Mom...er...Prompt

Finally! Here is where your prompt gets tacked on.

Closing Wrapper

It ends with a (probably short) closing statement to tell the AI that the instructions are done, and to start doing its thing.

All of this is then sent down the line to the remote AI, and we wait for the response while clicking on Red Quill logos and getting achievements.

Many a Slip

So, assuming everything goes well thus far, we get to the fun of the internet: You click/tap on “Continue” and RQ sends this giant blob off to the AI. Assuming there are no problems with connectivity, we’ll get a reply. There are obviously many possible points of failure here, and this is the part where those “Unable to connect to server” might be coming from (although they could be coming from Railway as well. Or both.)

The Money Shot

Let’s assume your prompt gets all the way to the AI with no problems (and, despite what some might think, this is the case the vast majority of the time). Once it gets there, RQ has to pay the company who owns the LLM for the use. Every time. Think about the quote from Goodfellas:

Prompt badly constructed? Fuck you, pay me.

Didn’t get a response you like? Fuck you, pay me.

Something getting messed up on the trip back? Fuck you, pay me.

No matter what happens, RQ (likely) has to pay for every single prompt that reaches the AI. And here’s where we run into the first issue that really had an impact on users.

AW Yeah

RQ can be seen as a bit of a victim of it’s own success. Even in beta, even while they are actively working on improving the site, they have drawn a TON of users. While this is great, there is an issue with this.

First, they missed the first step in the Free-to-Play manual: allow users to buy stuff. They have (wisely and correctly) limited the number of free quills available daily. They have (unwisely) not allowed non-members to buy quill packs. This, I believe, is the root of their money issues. One of the best statements I ever read about piracy was that it was not a failure of morals, it was a failure of the market: allow people to buy your music/software/game in a reasonable manner and they will. Deny them that ability and they will pirate. Obviously you can’t pirate quills, but people would happily buy them if they could. It is silly to only sell them to the people who have memberships, who are presumably the people least interested in buying quills. There is probably a reason or this (not wanting to have to worry about people losing money while things are in flux) but I don’t know what it is. I have to assume, relying on Hanlon, that there was a good reason. YMMV.

Now, they initially had everyone using Ember and Ink all the time. The default setting was “Auto”, which just used one of those, likely based on traffic. Within the first year or so of beta access, however, they had a half million users that generated more than 300 million stories. That’s a story for each and every man, woman, and child in the US. That’s a lot of fucking stories.

If you remember, every one of those costs them money. Ideally, this cost would be paid for with quills. But because they got so popular so quickly, they didn’t have time to dial in those costs or adjust them. So the bills just kept racking up, and that was a big problem.

To try to slow down the blood loss, they introduced Advanced Writes. Ideally, the standard option would be “good enough” for 30-40% of users, and the AWs would be used by the others. However, they are having trouble getting standard to behave, likely because they have a tighter limit from the AI provider (maybe context size).

Because they were probably trying to plug the leaks in the rapidly sinking boat, they couldn’t spend time to get the AW economy right. It had to be fast. But to keep the villagers with torches and pitchforks at bay (outside the sinking boat? I don’t know…go with me here), they gave existing users a big dollop of AW tokens and implemented a short-term exchange (which was, in effect, free AWs—which still cost them money).

And this is where we are today. If something changes at the AI, then the generations at RQ go wonky. They can’t alter the AI, they can only try to tweak the wrappers to cajole the AI into doing what we want. But it’s a bit like trying to change the weather by directing a bunch of butterflies in the park. It can happen, but it’s not easy and it’s not quick. And it’s probably why the site is in Beta.

------

I hope this helps people understand a little better how this all works, and why some of this stuff happens. When we don’t have information, humans tend to invent stories to make sense of the world around us—we attribute bad intentions to teachers that are mean, or stories about big people in the sky with super powers, or theories about authorities hiding information from us. Usually, once you learn about what is actually happening, the truth is a lot more boring and a lot less threatening. Although, sadly, not usually any less frustrating.

This isn’t meant to explain or excuse any particular issue, but rather to shed some light on the functioning (as best I can work it out) to make it less magical and mysterious. I am open to any corrections or explanations that anyone can offer.

 

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

TDP