- mobile phone: writer plus (android) has not let me down in the ten years i used it; since i shifted from writing on mobile to writing on desktop it's mostly used for note-taking, lists, organising thoughts, everything brief (not suited for long-form); no file sync, but i'm glad for it. google docs, to transport work and take notes--very reluctantly, as grammar suggestions cannot be turned off.
- currently writing on an ancient laptop with a keyboard that continuously loses functionality. brief libreoffice phase in 2025; having to back files up manually however doesn't suit me, and i found the two times i copy-pasted fic over to ao3 it required tedious format fixing. so i write mostly in google docs, having the luxurious ability to turn genai features off (otherwise i would have found something else; ellipsus doesn't have me convinced yet). since sometime in 2025 grammar suggestions are also turned off and the remaining spellcheck does very little, so typos are the result of this + ancient keyboard + ignorance. copy-pasting from gdocs into ao3's rich text box seems to preserve most of the formatting. -- my usual setup consists of four tabs: gdocs, an en/ger dictionary, a thesaurus, and a tab for checking wikipedia or otherwise looking things up. i don't use genai tools, as someone who both has never even used autocorrect/predictive text on mobile, and values the ways factual information affects a fic's events. ublock origin is most helpful with blocking genai elements on websites. when i run out of ideas in general, i usually look up prompt lists on tumblr, old fest prompt archives, or find pre-genai prompt generators. for more specific ones, i tend to bother friends for help or ditch a draft until i can help myself. for sprinting, alone or with friends: wordsprints; doesn't lose any writing, automatic em dashes and curly quotes, no double spaces etc.; messes with paragraphs when pasting existing writing, censors cursing in the chat; parent software is committed to no genai tools. -- i've accumulated many hundreds of wips since i started writing fic in 2016, but i tend to have fewer ideas these days, and finish more of them; published fic is only the tip of the draft iceberg. it does take longer, since i developed the capacity to write 10k fic and short fic is a now irretrievable past, and i still have a terrible habit of ditching drafts whenever i get stuck, especially with no submission date in sight. i try to post something for birthdays, other than that currently trying to figure out how to build a schedule that won't overwhelm me; more weight rests on a year-specific guardrails list with general to-dos, such as a rewrite, a continuation, an f/f fic, a horror fic, etc.
apr 19 2026 ∞
apr 20 2026 +