What writing software do you prefer?

[EarlyMorningLight]

I would never ever trust a cloud for my creations. Especially google. Their entire business is collecting information on anyone or anything and selling it. Why do you think that they bought Fitbit a couple of years ago?

Worried about a crash? We write text. The memory is tiny (relatively). Every few weeks I copy my entire fiction folder to a memory stick. It takes like 3 minutes to copy. I stick it in and pour myself a tea, come back and it's done. Worried about a house fire? Copy it again to a second stick and put it in the shed.

Someone earlier mentioned that they loved the cloud because they didn't have to worry about saving their work. Srsly? Like lazy much? Ctrl-S, come on.

Eh, the account I use for writing erotica is completely separate from the accounts I use for other things, so I'm not concerned about what information they're collecting. If Google wants to read my smut, hell, I put it here on Lit for free anyway.

Unless you go completely off grid, give up smartphones, social media, most of the internet, etc., these companies are going to track you anyway. It's a cost of engaging with modern technology, because capitalism is an amoral hellscape. Might as well reap the benefits of having my work backed up, accessible from multiple devices, and easily shared with beta readers/editors/collaborators.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Google records every IP ever. They know exactly who you are.

 

[onehitwanda]

Well, I'm going to look like a serious nerd, now... I write TeX with a bunch of custom macros.

Lets me render out into a lot of different formats, whilst maintaining very precise in how to control the representation. Lit mostly just gets the plain text version. But I also build out PDF, ePub, and HTML versions that are all highly tuned towards their own environment.

It also means that my original files are absolutely filled with comments, highlights, tags and so on, that self-assemble into a wiki of sorts, whilst also not appearing anywhere in the rendered books. Making it easier to handle those larger story arcs.

Hello fellow nerd.

I use Lyx, backed by TeX. I like that TeX is a text format, not some random proprietary binary or, worse, xml-encoded monstrosity. I love the ability to keep inline notes, and I love even more that it does what I want, not what its peanut brain internal gremlin thinks I might want to do - were I drunk, stoned or suffering some sort of psychiatric emergency.

I find the ability to change the rendering between book, letter, a4, et cetera aids in finding errors that would otherwise slip by due to overfamiliarity. Changing the position of a word on a page often makes it easier for me to realise why something isn't working as well as I want it to. I could never go back - I tried, once, and it broke me.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Recently saw someone post about their laptop dying and losing significant work on a story. This is the stuff of nightmares for me, and it’s one of the reasons that I have everything in Google docs.

Storing data on the cloud is probably safer than storing it on a laptop (in terms of data loss, not privacy) but it's not risk-free. Take the OVHCloud fire last year: a commercial data centre caught fire, and although data was "backed up", a lot of the backups were in the same building, so they all burned together and customers lost their data - and those were people paying for a service with backups!

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/...data-center-fire-one-year-on-what-do-we-know/

I'd recommend not putting all one's eggs in one basket, even Google's shiny hi-tech basket. I aim for a mix of local and cloud saves, so if any one or two drives die, it's still out there.

I remember reading something a long time ago about how Tori Amos (i think it was her, could have been someone else) got robbed of her bag (don't recall what it was) and she had to plead with the robber to get her handwritten lyrics back. Which she was able to keep.

That was way back, pre-interenet.

I hadn't heard that one, but Hemingway lost a whole bunch of work:

https://lostmanuscripts.com/2010/07/31/hemingways-lost-suitcase/

 

[Handley_Page]

I back up on to an external Hard Drive.

 

[SyleusSnow]

I've had long discussions with someone technical about keeping my filthy stories private, including using "the cloud". It must be working 'cause the police haven't kicked in my door and I still have a job If interested, their advice is detailed in "How to write smut in secret" on my blog (linked in my signature below).