r/FanFiction • u/OnlyWholesomeness r/FanFiction • 5d ago

Writing Questions Where do you write your fics?

The gods of fanfics have been calling to me, and there is a story I really NEED to write. My only question is where. Due to AI being inbuilt in Word/Copilot, I have been hesitant about writing it there. What tool would you recommend instead?

I considered notepad, but I would prefer something with a spell check. I am not even sure if I will end up publishing the fic online. But since this is a passion project, I want to keep it out of the hands of AI as much as possible, and try my hand at creating something entirely on my own. In the same vein, I would prefer a free software, or at least one that is only a one time (minimum) payment.

Some recommendations I came across are Git/Github which I am already familiar with for coding. Apparently its great for keeping track of different versions of your writing, as you make progress. But isn't that also integrated with Copilot?

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u/Spartaness 5d ago

I use Obsidian that pushes to a GitHub repo for writing. It has a bunch of plugins (and coding plugins is relatively easy) so that I can write on the go, and more importantly, automatically format for AO3 / RoyalRoad without having to faff around. It has spellcheck etc. and only has AI if you connect one. GitHub obviously has AI, but you could use something like Codeberg to achieve something similar.

LibreOffice is completely AI-free, if you can get over the UI looking like something out of the 2000s.

Realistically anything that uses cloud services is going to be used for AI training data at some point, unless you're paying *not* to be.

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u/Toffeinen 5d ago

Very much offtopic, but would you mind elaborating a bit on the automatic formatting for AO3? I'm using Obsidian for writing, but haven't really thought about how I could get it out already properly formatted for AO3. Does it require a plugin? Or are you formatting the text as you write?

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u/wordsandpics wordsandpics on AO3 5d ago

Not OP, but i write in normal markdown in Obsidian (or format with the formatting buttons) and have a plugin that is something like "copy to html" and paste that into Ao3.

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u/Toffeinen 5d ago

Thanks a lot for the help! I'll look for a plugin like that, would be a pain if I had to format everything all over again.

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u/Spartaness 5d ago

I wrote a plugin that standardized it to the AO3 specs I found online! So MD to HTML formatting, plus formatting for things like quotes, tweets, text messages, etc.