Prose. Season One: The first meeting: Orange dragon cloud: Prose. stands to take form.

...and then I was on the 99 turning off the bridge, right onto Stone, left onto Northgate and into Gas Works Park. HB and Zach stood there waiting, Zach barefoot with crazy hair, HB in shorts wearing a fedora. I laughed at them, jumped, we hugged, and walked up a sidewalk of Gas Works. The feeling of the day was good, the Sun high, and walking with them talking about Prose., I wondered if this was what it was like when the Facebook team started talking about it. I mentioned it and they laughed. Zach stared across the street at the coffee house where we were going, “This is big.”

Outside, Zach fished his shoes from his backpack and we sat. The cold kicked in all around us, the last traces of winter in Seattle grazed the streets: grey fingers, fading nails, and we took a seat inside. HB and I grabbed the coffees. Back at the table Zach pulled out his iPad and showed me the progress on Prose., the newest wireframes, and they were nothing short of amazing to stare upon. There was one screen with my photo and name as a sample page, and around my photo in circle, was an orange dragon with the word “Grandmaster” above it.

I looked at it, “What’s that?”

Zach looked at me, “The color is just a sample. And the name of the status isn’t set in stone, but I had the idea that as far as the writing contests and challenges, or whichever names we give them, for that part of Prose., we’d have levels, like Scribbler, Scribe—”

“Wordsmith,” HB said, “we need Wordsmith in there.”

Zach stared at me, a bit worried: concerned, obviously, that I would shoot down the level status. I stared back, “Brilliant.” His face relaxed, “Yeah?”

“Yeah, and I like it, Grandmaster, which I think is cool as fuck, and I think it at that high of a level, it should have those elements: the Japanese style throw-down, the jam circle, but for starters, I like Scribbler, Scribe, Wordsmith, Paperback, Hardcover, Best-Seller, in whichever order of level. But keep Grandmaster for a higher level, spice it up.”

“I like that, man. I really like that. It gives the feature more integrity.”

But that was just one part of it. There was the home screen with all the posts, each writer’s profile, and a reader’s profile, and an eventual feature for them if they wanted to show what they read and connect readers of the same genres for discussion. There would, in time, be a web app with the writer’s own page that would basically be a blog page with a link for the writer in one line, saved drafts, a photo they could personalize. I had a lot more listed in my notepad, and I turned the pages and read the ideas to them, and they wrote as I talked. HB made a good point about Prose. being open to all genres, so we would need every main genre we could think of. What we each started to see was that each genre of writing, from sci-fi to erotica, from romance to crime, from literary to nonfiction, from creative nonfiction to journalism. Each genre had its own world of Prose., each one could, in time, form groups and communities, and the news feed would be just as much fun to read than any other social media news feed. The three of us were wired on a wavelength. Two hours had passed like nothing. The energy at the table rose off and sent an orange dragon cloud over the room. A few tables started listening. The foul language from our excitement sent poison arrows around the room and caused a father to give Zach a pissed off look and move his family across the cafe. I laughed. We were two months south of summer, and it occurred to me that I'd only thought of Prose. one month earlier in Austin, exactly one month to the day from the table across from Gas Works. The time and 2,500 total miles between were merely vague necessities, yet bizarre stone steps to walk, that led to the first dev. team meeting. What each of us could feel there, and what a few tables around us maybe got a sense of, was that something was changing, a cultural shift devoid of ego or repose, simply because the work in front of us destroyed any of that bullshit. Each of our ideas, or anyone else's who would be needed to help build the sanctuary, would ultimately succeed or be adapted, or be absorbed by better ideas from the team. The goal was one now, it was Prose. I sat back and watched the street outside, and everything moved perfectly, under a Sun that had returned to the city to again destroy the rain.