#and other days im just opening my doc - writing 444 words of some silly thing no one is ever gonna read - and closing my doc again

[lexosaurus]

Yeah so I've like spent the last year testing some other writing things to see what I could use instead of the NaNo site for motivation and tracking my writing (especially because I'm horrible at holding myself accountable to write every day!!)

Anyone around me on Discord has heard me talk endlessly about this site but for the past few months I've been using 4thewords, which is a sort of gameified site where you have a character that goes on an adventure and "battles monsters" to earn stuff that you can use to complete "quests." The monsters are basically little characters with a very generous timer and a word count—ranging from like 50 to 5,000 words—and you type on a doc to "battle" them, and if you complete the words within the wordcount, you beat the monster woo!

The devs seem super friendly and very involved with the online writing community. The site itself is extremely fun and engaging. You can set your own monthly or weekly goals, choose your own side quests outside of the main storyline, and you can even battle bigger monsters "with" other writers (aka everyone writes in their own doc and you try, as a team, to write however many words the monster needs to be defeated).

I absolutely am obsessed with this site and pretty much exclusively use it to draft my chapters now. And when I'm done drafting, I copy/paste to my Google Doc and edit from there.

There's a free version of the site which gives you one free document (again, you can just copy/paste out of it at the end of your writing sessions) and you can battle a certain number of monsters per day. I ended up loving it so much I paid for the subscription, but even if I didn't have the money for that, the free version is 500% worth it.

Seriously, I can't recommend this site enough as a replacement for the NaNo site if you're on the hunt for that after their demise the last year, and now this nail in the coffin. Honestly, I like it way better than NaNo.

Happy September everybody, NaNoWriMo has decided to go "no YOU'RE the baddies" because no one likes their AI-ridden sponsor, lmao. In other news, multiple authors are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.