I've been writing all my life (sorta, kinda)
I started my first novel when I was fourteen or so. It was... technically sci-fi? Technological fantasy? If Star Wars is fantasy disguised as space opera, this was fantasy disguised as YA dystopian sci-fi (about a decade before The Hunger Games came out). But it was... It was written by a fourteen-year-old. Moving on.
Next came the Part One to a planned duology. Technically a far-flung sequel to that first novel, and thoroughly fantasy, it was about a war between destiny and free will. I re-read it recently: it was actually pretty good all things considered! I wouldn't want to show it to anyone without a total rewrite, but it could have been much worse.
Then came The Winter. That's not the title of a book. That's the roughly eighteen-year gap during which I didn't do any writing. I was busy doing... stuff? Living life. Always thinking about writing something, always calling myself a wannabe writer, but never writing.
But then a character started poking at me, and she had a story to tell. Maybe lots of stories. And once I'd started on her origin tale, I couldn't get enough. I had missed writing. I've started multiple other novels since then, although I keep coming back to Lucy Slant. Her first book is almost done.
So why build a whole writing app?
Well, I've tried them all. Handwriting (in ink and e-ink both), Word, Google Docs, Scrivener... Hell, even markdown. I am a software engineer, after all.
But none of them were right for me. Handwriting is satisfying, but it's slow. And painfully slow to transcribe to digital. After The Winter, my reMarkable 2 was great for the transcription, until I accidentally discovered just how much faster I was at typing than handwriting. Hardly a revelation, I know, but sometimes you just don't internalise things you know to be true.
So I switched to Google Docs. And then to an opinionated SaaS app that fit me well (think Google Docs with all the settings exactly the way I personally would want them), except for the minor issue that there was an annoying amount of AI in it. But "Google Docs with a bunch of features you'll never use" isn't a great product to attach to a paid subscription, so I looked elsewhere.
I tried writing in markdown in a Git repo (don't worry, if you're not a coder you don't need to understand that sentence!), tried the same in Obsidian, and I even briefly played with writing in Notion.
Scrivener got a fair shake too, but I wasn't a fan of the open-ended, DIY approach to project structure, and I really wanted an app that would bring in the challenge setting and tracking that I'd recently lost when the NaNoWriMo website went away.
Ultimately, none of it felt right, and none of it encouraged the habit of writing.
So I decided to make the app I wanted. I pretty much quit writing to do it, because my brain loves a new project. I should admit that that "pretty much" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though. I started two new novels in the process of testing early versions, and although they haven't got very far yet, I can't deny they've taken up what could have been coding time. But somehow I stayed quite consistent on that coding! And Literally is the result. It's taken me two years, but I'm immensely proud of it, and now using it for my own writing daily. There are so many exciting things I want to add to it, but it's already all I need to throw myself back into writing.
So what's next for Literally? And me?
It's October 2026 as I write this, and a month of "testing" the app before launch has turned into real work, and netted me a little over 20,000 words! I love Literally, and I hope you will too. Let's see how soon I can finish this darn book now that I have the app I wanted.
But meanwhile, there's lots to do for that app. This is just the beginning. Internationalisation and custom themes, for starters. And I've laid a solid groundwork for synchronising across devices, so making that a first-class feature would be a priority too. I've also been thinking about a levelled-up clipboard (the place in memory that you copy to and paste from), that actually holds more than one block of text.
These would all be part of further 1.x versions, meaning they'd be free upgrades when they drop. Your licence, if you buy today, is for all of v1.x. I will eventually release a v2, but that's a while away yet. A year at least. And it'll earn the upgrade cost, I promise. I'm thinking plugins.
Ashleigh M Shepherd