I love re-reading the short stories of H. P. Lovecraft each year.

Especially his best works, his classics, like:

  • The Call of Cthulhu
  • At the Mountains of Madness
  • The Shadow over Innsmouth
  • The Colour Out of Space
  • The Dunwich Horror

And on.

Sure, Lovecraft is probably a terrible person, but awesome at his art (cosmic horror).

Anyway, I often flirt with the idea of writing fiction, and writing horror short stories like Lovecraft, would be a great achievement for me.

One approach would be to to use copywork, to rewrite the stories myself in order to internalize the style.

I was thinking about this during my early morning sojourn, specifically:

It would be cool to have a little tool that would assist in Lovecraft copywork.

Some thoughts:

  • A webapp that presents one paragraph or snippet of text at a time in a large font easy to read and copy.
  • Use arrows to move forward/back or up/down in the text, whatever metaphor makes sense.
  • Toggle to support either handwriting or typing-based copywork.

Also, tons of people do copywork with Lovecraft. They too could make use of a simple webapp.

Anyway, I worked with gpt4o and whipped up a minimal version, using Lovecraft texts from the H.P. Lovecraft Archive.

Here’s a screenshot of the homepage:

The about text for the project reads:

About This Project Copywork is the practice of handwriting or typing out passages from works of admired authors to internalize their style, rhythm, and techniques, helping fiction writers improve their own craft through imitation and analysis.

H.P. Lovecraft was an early 20th-century American writer renowned for his unique blend of cosmic horror, existential dread, and richly detailed mythos, whose works are loved for their ability to evoke a profound sense of awe and terror at humanity’s insignificance in a vast, uncaring universe.

Welcome to Lovecraft Copywork, a platform where fiction writers (like you!) can practice copywork with the chilling words of H.P. Lovecraft. Select a piece from the list above and start typing to immerse yourself and absorb the writing styles from the eerie world of cosmic horror.

Here’s a screenshot of me doing copywork for Dagon:

Here’s the link:

  • LovecraftCopywork

UPDATE, Move to here: LovecraftCopywork.com

It was fun to make.

This is an MVP, some extensions include:

  • Keep track of where the user is up to.
  • Keep track of what texts the user has completed.
  • Add daily streaks.
  • Add a 20 minute timer.
  • Add an “add to calendar” button, to help habit formation.
  • Dark mode.
  • Easter eggs.
  • AI-generated art.
  • Text to speech.

And more!

I may play with more it later.