Here’s how it works — you start reading a story, choosing options to move the story forward, and working your way though other people’s contributions until you reach a part that hasn’t been written or hasn’t been provided with options to move the story forward, what they call a “fragment”. Then, you start writing. Your segment will become one branch of the story’s structure, and others can rate it. Once it’s written, you only have 60 minutes to make changes before it’s locked for good (so that others aren’t caught out using elements in their new branches that you’ve deleted from the branch they’re building on).

Protagonize seems to have built up a fun, active community of writers — there are hundreds of stories and authors working on them. While it probably isn’t the place to write your next best-seller, if you’re looking for a fun way to connect with other authors, Protagonize might be just the thing.

Protagonize (Free)

The good news is, if you can get to a computer, you can write.

There are several good online word processors that you can access from any computer with a web browser, regardless of whether it’s a Mac, a PC, even a Linux computer. These services can also act as an online backup for your work, keeping everything you’re working on and have worked on available in a centralized place.

My favorite, by far, is Adobe’s Buzzword. The flash-based interface is gorgeous and easy to use, and it offers a number of little bells-and-whistles that are useful for writers, such as a running word count, an active revision history, and the ability to share documents with collaborators.

Buzzword is a fairly new arrival on the web-based application scene, which means there’s a lot more to come. For example, Adobe is promising better font support (right now, you’re limited to using the handful of oddball fonts Adobe has provided — granted, they’re beautiful, as you’d expect from the people that brought us on-screen fonts for computers). At the moment, you can save as Word .doc, HTML, and the effectively universal Rich Text Format; Adobe says PDF support is on its way.

I use Buzzword for just about all my writing, even when I’m at home. I like it so much that I started writing a book, just so I could play with it! When I was planning this site, I wrote almost a hundred posts in advance using Buzzword. That way, I could log in and add new posts whenever and wherever I felt like — even though the site itself wasn’t built yet. (If you click through to the large version of the screenshot, you’ll see I even use it for writing HTML code!)

Bonus tip: Hit F11 on your keyboard to put your browser into full-screen mode while using Buzzword.

Buzzword (free)