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as a reminder to literally anyone and everyone who even so much as considers this: AO3 has NO autosave ability when you’re making drafts, so PLEASE do not use it instead of a writing program.
If their server goes down, if you hit a wrong button and refresh the page or go back to the previous page, if you accidentally close the browser, if your browser or device crashes, etc etc etc you are shit out of luck. Your work is gone forever, it didn’t backup to anywhere and there is NO recovery option. Even TUMBLR’s drafting ability is supposed to autosave and often does.
If you want to avoid gdocs that’s fine- there’s other text editors with simple autosave options, like Online Notepad or Digital Scholar’s notepad, or there’s still local-drive writing programs that are free and open source, like LibreOffice. PLEASE do not use AO3 to write your stories into directly. It has NOTHING.
Every November during NaNoWriMo, Scrivener goes on sale at a steep discount. It is the best writing program I have ever used AND it has a super reliable autosave.
LibreOfficr is also a great alternative as mentioned above. I have it, too, just in case.
Definitely don’t use AO3 for a writing program. Also, save your work in multiple places. I have my works on my D: drive with a copy on my C: drive and ANOTHER copy on an external drive and I have emailed them to myself so they are on a couple of clouds. My most prized short story is also printed.
Just mentioning that because being paranoid about preserving your work as a writer is essential. Even if you never post or publish it. You will hate yourself otherwise.
Reblogging to add that Campfire is an excellent writing app as well. It has outstanding local autosave and cloud saving features. You can write from your phone, tablet, PC, or browser and it all syncs up.
In addition to writing, you can also add your own languages, maps, magic/legendary items, wiki articles, character sheets, and so much more. They’re all integrated really well and it’s a great way to keep track of all the shit you come up with.
The app is free for limited use (you can write up to 25k words in manuscript, have a set number of timeline events and character sheets, etc). Unlike some apps, you can do everything for free, including customize the appearance and theme.
Upgrading is done per feature, so you only pay for what you actually need. For example, it costs $1.50/month for unlimited writing. That’s nothing. You can also pay for annual or lifetime upgrades, for folks who prefer not to have monthly subscriptions.
And the icing on the cake, you can easily add collaborators or readers to your projects. I cannot recommend it enough.
I wrote this post initially to address folks who prefer not downloading complicated apps, since if they’re using AO3 they are probably doing it because it is a very simple rich text editor, but these are good additions for anyone looking for something a bit more complex, with more features. Personally I can’t use either, I have to have as simple of a program as possible.
I also forgot to mention Write or Die and Written? Kitten! The latter is mostly as bad as AO3 in terms of autosave (it will keep your text if you refresh but not if you navigate away or crash), but you at least get a visual reminder every 100 words if you want to move your writing off the site so you can write in a simple box and save elsewhere. The former is a less a program and more a threat, but in the writing stage it’s just a text box with a timer and a word counter, so I use it sometimes when even LibreOffice’s simple toolbars are a distraction, or if I need a focused time period to write in. If you have the WOD program on desktop at least, it will also create a backup text file as you write, to whatever folder you want, in case of crashes.
Look, write however you want I guess, but writing directly into AO3 is a gamble at best. At some point something out of your control will happen, and you’ll lose something you loved, and it’s going to really fucking SUCK. I don’t want that for you. Your writing is precious enough to at least try to protect up front by creating it someplace even marginally safer.
Also, relatedly, please please please do not publish mostly empty works with a bunch of tags that say stuff like “AO3 draft because of time limit please ignore” and a work text that says something like “erm sorry this is just a placeholder so my draft doesn’t get deleted because of the stupid time limit lol”. NO! STOP THAT! Those mostly empty works are considered spam, and they make the search function more annoying to use for literally everyone else on the site. They’re also reportable, and people will absolutely 100% report your account over them (and frankly, they should!). AO3 isn’t a writing program. The AO3 drafts aren’t meant for actually writing in, they’re just meant to be a place so you’ve got like a month or so to play around with the html formatting before you post a work. The draft time limit is specifically there so that people don’t use it to draft works over an indefinite time span. It’s meant to prevent people from doing literally exactly this.
If you’re just looking for a writing program that isn’t Word or Google Docs, any of the options listed above are great – I myself use LibreOffice, and it’s what I usually recommend to people. If, on the other hand, you’re writing in the AO3 drafts because you’re having trouble transferring the formatting of your drafts over from Word or Google Docs and don’t really know html, here is a great guides to help make the process easy:
Formatting Tips – From Word and Docs to Ao3
Here’s an additional thing that you can set up on Google Docs specifically that basically allows you to toggle between rich text and html, just like in the AO3 drafts, so that if you want to do funky things with formatting you can still just copy/paste:
Also, if all else fails, here’s a guide for fixing your formatting in Word if it’s gotten screwed up and AO3 isn’t recognizing where the paragraph breaks should be and stuff:
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