New in Ellipsus: June 2026

If you haven’t heard, this June we debuted Ellipsus Plus: a colorful, creative, and—of course!—human way to help us keep building Ellipsus independently and sustainably, while supporting the free plan available to everyone.

Plus gives you more ways to make Ellipsus your own by customizing your writing space, with tools to explore the patterns and choices shaping your craft, share your words in more personal and playful ways, and show the human process that brought your work to life.

Take a tour of everything in the plan (so far!) in our Plus Features Tour video!

All purchases and payment plans end in forever ownership of the Plus license (no eternal subscriptions!). You can start a free trial anytime—no payment info required.

And hot on the heels of the grand debut of Plus, we added four new metrics to Writing Insights.

Repeated phrases

Find the multi-word phrases that recur throughout your draft (including the ones that somehow appeared thirteen times without your beta noticing). You can sort through your top-ten most-used phrases (for phrases containing up to six words).

Dialogue balance

See your draft’s percentage of dialogue vs. narration, and where each appears throughout your doc.

Points of view

Explore how many sentences are written from each POV—first person, second, and third—and make extra-sure you didn’t accidentally switch halfway through (or just observe how perspective operates across a more experimental work).

Punctuation habits

See how frequently you use expressive punctuation marks per 1,000 words?!!!?!! (Yes!)

Writing Insights can make editing move a lot faster by helping you catch things that are easy to miss on the page (like POV shifts, phrases you’ve leaned on a bit too often, and lots of other patterns that aren't quite doing what you intended). Now, there are 14 Insights in total!

But they’re not only there to point out what you might want to improve! Together, your Insights create a kind of fingerprint of your writing style—showing you the rhythms and choices that make your voice yours. (We think that's pretty neat.)

Writing Insights runs locally in your browser—without AI, of course—and your text never leaves the editor for analysis.

This one's for those of us with a thousand weirdly-titled WIPs on the dash... (you know who you are). Get on top of your docs and folders with our new list view for dashboard.

Super useful for writers whose dashboards have become a teeming mass of folders, notes, abandoned openings, alternate endings, and docs called things like Chapter-8-FINAL-final-REAL.

Try it out with our handy toggle located in the sorting menu at the top right of your dashboard.

And yes: list view is free for all! Because who doesn’t love a list?

We also added a new writing template to the Ellipsus template library—The Hero’s Journey.

You'll know this story structure: the hero is pushed out of their ordinary world on an adventure, facing obstacles, winning, and returning transformed.

It's a beloved tale that has been told thousands of times (Homer's Odyssey, Star Wars, Jane Eyre, and so many more)—so join the club and tell your version!

Use it as a full plotting framework or a deep dive into character motivations for a story already in progress—it’s your choice.

Preview

Key trial

Since this stage represents the majority of the second act, add as many trials as you need to develop your story and build towards the next stage.

• Inciting incident:
• New allies:
• New enemies:
• Resolution:

The Inmost Cave

The stakes only keep rising, and pressure on the Hero builds. Stakes may become clearer, but also more layered and nuanced. There may be fallout from Key Trials from the previous stage that the Hero must grapple with (this can be an external crisis or the Hero's internal conflict, reflected in their worst traits taking control).

• Inner challenges:
• External challenges:
• Added stakes:

The Ordeal/Temptation

The central crisis or confrontation of the story. The Hero faces death (or their greatest fears). They may be presented with a terrible choice: achieve all they want, but at the highest cost.

• Crisis Event:
• Temptations:
• Tragic choice:

Ahhh, Pride month. The parties (at our desks 🫠), the long days (working to get Plus out on the dot), the yearning (… for everyone to upgrade to Plus)… It’s all just so gay! (Friendly reminder to support your fave “Gay GoogleDocs” and other queer-owned businesses!)

And just as every year, we wanted to pause and remember who we are, why we’re here, and the histories and communities that make Pride possible. So we shared a collection of 24 writing prompts for Pride to help you break away from standard narratives, deepen your queer stories and characters, explore new themes and possibilities, and reflect on what it means to be queer in all our glorious multiplicities.

Queer elders, found families, first transformations, old rebellions, the versions of ourselves we had to imagine before we knew they could exist…

You can find them all in our blog post. Happy Pride, Ellipsus fam. 🌈

We also invited writers from the Ellipsus community to tell us why Pride is important to them. Watch the videos to hear what they had to say!

• Certain rowdy outlines should no longer fall out of sync with document structure.
• It's now possible to cancel your Ellipsus Plus trial. (Never fear, you still won't get auto-charged when it ends).
• We've been busy on socials this month, weighing in on the crisis of AI-based AI verifiers on BlueSky and tweeting at the Pope (⁉⁉⁉ What a timeline...)
• YouTube essayist Roughest Drafts did a great deep dive video essay about our Emboss feature, and the larger issues surrounding human work vs. AI authorship accusations, with the question: how can we defend creative labor (and make the human process visible)?
• Shoutout to the Queer Liberation Library for exceeding their Pride fundraising goal!!

Thank you so much for making our biggest month yet such a phenomenal one.

Every person who writes with Ellipsus, tells a friend, joins the community, shares a post, sends us feedback, or chooses to support us through Plus helps us keep building and thriving.💆‍♂️

Onward and upward for July!

Happy writing and happy Pride,

The Ellipsus Team xo

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