I found two programs that I’d like to recommend, one is AI driven and one is not. So –
SimpleNote https://simplenote.com/
This is a low resource program that sort of works like OneNote. If you have a old shit computer like I do – you are often on the hunt for programs that doesn’t require a whole lot of your computers memory.
So for this example, I have to explain something first. So one thing that I use chatGPT for is to for instance give me colorscemes for concepts, and you can download the answer as a txt file. But if you are as unorganized or forgetful as me, you will end up with 10+ txt files in your folder called ‘answer’. And while i actually am a huge fan of notepad, then it is annoying to have all those files to sort through.
One Note is great and have a ton of nice options, but for a computer like mine, you have to open it, do your thing and close it. If I have that open with Word, my computer sounds like a plane taking off within 5 minutes (get a new computer, i know, I know).
But besides the lack of all the neat stuff in OneNote, Simplenote is basically the same, and takes up a fragment of memory. You can download it as an app to your computer (like I did) or you can use it as a browser extention.
So here you see the app, and like OneNote it has tabs for your notes, and here we have a colorsceme from Bing, and note that you can tag your entries.
here you have the tags, and you can click them to find all your entries with that tag (that is sort of what tags do, amirite?) – but it makes it stupid easy to find all your notes.
Also the links work, and you can just click them, and it will open in your default browser.
To add images you can use the ‘markdown’ option, but i find it’s shit – but then again, this is for notes and whatever you feel you might need on hand – and you can always link to a image.
Now it has two other super nice options. Both are located up in the little menu at the top right corner, this is also where you find the ‘markdown’ option btw.
You can chose to collaborate which like OneNote will send this page to another Simplenote user, and you can both work on the same note (can’t say I ever used this option, but it might actually be super helpful for some)
And you can publish, which gives you a link, you can either send to someone, or upload to your blog whatever. It’s barebones, but if you just want to share something like this above, or a recipe or something like that. this is GOLDEN! Also it’s super quick. And to my knowledge there is no wordmax.
The other program is AI driven and if that is not your jam, just ignore it, and the world keeps turning.
Now I can’t be the only one who likes to worldbuild, and who likes to complicate shit to the point where I want to cry. There is schrivner, sure – but that confuses me even more than my stupid notes.
There is a program called novel.ai, and I am not defending what others do, I am explaining what I use it for. Because I do not considder this AI writing at all, fight me.
You can both write a text or a scenario (i never used scenario, so I can’t tell you anything about how that works) – And let’s say you are writing a short story and is hard stuck. You don’t have someone you can send it to and get feedback, or you are too impatient.
This is where novel.ai comes in (for me at atleast)
You can write a summary, and tweak the models, memory and all that – There is a great reddit page if you are intrested in what they can do. How I use this is that I tweak the memory and history and all that to the tone I am using (that is a whole damn phd in itself), and write.
I have this as an app, and as you can see here, the blue is my text, and the white is the AI. If you are in a corner or unsure of what you think someone should do, you click the ‘send’ button and it gives you like two sentences, you can delete and change (changed text in the ai text shows up as pink), and you can delete the whole suggegstion and try again.
The ai takes its knowledge from your text, from your tweaks, but also from the lorebook, and this is why i love novel.ai for writers block.
this is the lorebook, here we have a part of town, you can of course tweak and change as you go along. And I will refer to the reddit post I linked above for a tech answer to this.
But what this is, is both so I can manually look stuff up – at this point it’s so early in this story that I have not used categories yet.
So you write what it is, and the keywords are what the AI use to know what page to look at, so if I keyword this ‘slums’ ‘city’ every time I write this (if It’s enabled) the Ai will (if I click start to get a suggestion) go through the blurb, and make an educated guess.
In order for this to work right, you would in this blurb, list the characters you need – as I said you can edit, remove and add all the time, both in lorebook and memory. So let’s say X and Y lives in this part of town, I would list them in the blurb.
the slums blurb would now be something along with:
*nameofslums* is the slums of *nameofcity* (perhaps add a description of atmosphere and special marks)
Y lives there above the *nameofbar*
X visits the *nameofbar*
*nameofbar* (perhaps descriptions of where it’s located)
Then I would make a category called ‘city’ where I would include both the slums, and the character lore entries too. (again you can change this constantly, so if you need it for a chapter, do that and change it back)
Let’s pretend that X is from out of town, and is looking for her husband Z, but he is not there, I wouldn’t add Z to the category, or list him in the blurb. I would however have:
X is married to Z, in X’s character entry,
‘Z is missing’ & ‘Z is married to X’ in Z’s character entry
In the tags of the slums entry, I would add the name of the bar, the name of the city, and any other landmarks, and what else I could think of which would bring this into play, like for instance market, or hotel. (they’d also need their own lore entry tho, if you want to include it)
So how this works is:
[your text] X went to the slums, and looked around the market, she didn’t understand where Z could have gone, surely he would have a good reason to go here like she had read in his note to his buddy. She entered the
[ai text] bar and asked Y if she had seen Z around, while she ordered a bottle of water. Y said ‘try the hotel’.
this is because of the lorebook, the ai knows that Y is in the bar, and X is looking for Z, it also knows there is a hotel, and if you added that X likes water in her entry, it will perhaps also include that.
And well then you write on –
You can also change the style for segments and chapters, so if you need something incredibly sad, you can change the memory to *focus on grief* or if you need something raunchy, you can change it to *focus on erotica*
Because you see, novel.ai does not have any inhibitors, you can write exactly what you want. It doesn’t judge you, or stop you from using blacklisted words.
And you can then download your file in a handful of different formats.
Now cons..
Besides Ai writing being a HUGE damn greyzone, and I only use it to keep my characters and places neatly ordered, and as a writing partner as I showed you above, it gives me suggestions when I need it.
Then you can’t really make chapters, and the ai can only take a fixed amount of words. So what you can do is make a shelf (again check the reddit post) and copy your work, then delete the text on the copy and call it 2. this way you have the same data on your new page, and the Ai will work from the same ‘knowledge’ and it is ‘techically’ chapter 2.
The biggest con, is that it’s not free. this is a program that needs a subscribtion, and it’s not real cheap either. It is however the only writing buddy type Ai I have experienced that is not either incredibly dodgy, or have a long list of blacklisted words which makes it unusable for me.
I do believe they have a trial, so you can try it out.
And lastly, I don’t condone that you just make the ai write your story, because as I stated many times before, I am all for Ai as a help, but it’s problematic when it’s your product so to say. I make ai art for banners, character sheets (that never leaves my googledrive and is just because i like to make them) and for my narration videos. I do not upload ai art and call it my artwork. And writing ai like any other ai, will give you some amazing bullshit if you rely on it – I am working on a little something to prove just that (much like my ai crochet patterns), and is basically just for entertainment – because ai is silly.
Anyways, the reason I recommend novel.ai is because I find it a good way to have a ‘intelligent’ lorebook which gives you ‘intelligent’ suggestions to your writers block, or can help you of a corner you wrote yourself into. Basically i see it as a tool, just like outwrite (which i also use all the time) which is a program that helps you weed out bad grammar, syntax and can suggest different ways to write a sentence – which is golden for me, i am not native English speaking and while I can tell a specific sentence is wonky, I can’t always figure out how to change it, but outwrite can by both shifting the words around, and removing and adding other words, making your sentence better (or in my case, readable)
I know novel.ai can do a bunch of other things, but I never used it for any of them.
DREAMS OF A LOST MOONCHILD 
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