I need to write about my life. In long form. I have PTSD (diagnosed, medicated) from childhood violence, and I found out a while back that my mom hated me from before I was born. So I was basically raised like Sybil was raised. My mom turned everyone in her, in our, life against me since earliest childhood. I was kicked out of the family when I was 11.
Now she’s 86, and I want to set the record straight before she dies.
I began writing about it in a college writing class, and was surprised by how apparently effective/affecting it was. Years have gone by, and as someone who was quite literally raised to hate myself, I’ve encountered (created) an unbroken series of obstacles that kept me from getting back to it.
But her inevitable (and devoutly to be wished) shucking off of her mortal coil has given me a sense of urgency. I want to write it in absolute private, even secrecy, and share it with my siblings as a finished thing.
I thought of starting a new FB profile, then sharing it with them when it was done, but I had my FB hacked and totally deleted few years ago and do t want to chance that again. I thought of doing it in Google docs, or as a draft email, but I’ve already lost two Google accounts to storage extortion.
Looking around online all I can find are blogs with “free trials,” and then a monthly fee. What I plan to do is finish it and then either publish to a private Facebook page or email it individually.
Looking for suggestions on how to accomplish this. Help much appreciated.
Regarding “Google storage extortion” – As far as I know photos uploaded from your computer into your posts do not count against your google account storage. When I post videos I upload them to youtube first (no storage limit) and then embed them in the post.
I don’t upload them at all. My “unlimited’ storage has been used up by email attachments, and it’s locked across all google services until I pay for a subscription. Or lose it.
Either I’m not understanding the question or you’re viewing some of the premium features one has to pay extra for as indispensible. I’ve never paid for blogging space on Dreamwidth, WordPress, LiveJournal, or Substack.
I use WordPress and Blogger. You’ll want set them to tight security restrictions if you’re writing about sensitive stuff.
LiveJournal is now hosted in Russia. My only password leak was LiveJournal when it switched to Russia. It also now has some content restrictions. Based on Russian law, for example, promoting homosexuality is illegal.
GoogleDocs is free, online and backed up (just be careful you do not delete your work by accident…maybe make a copy of the document every day or week or whatever suits you…that is also free…have as many as you want…maybe there is an actual limit but I can’t imagine you coming anywhere close to that limit with a bunch of text documents).
It’s not the best editor in the world but seems sufficient for your purposes.
Once written you can share the document with whoever you want, also free.
After 20 years, my google account has reached 15g. This is their “surprise!” limit. They threatened to lock the profile unless I started paying a monthly fee. I went in and deleted 5g+ of old files. This didn’t affect their total figure of ~15g. So I’ve already lost one of the two profiles I’ve had for 15 and 20 years.
So at the very least I’d have to create a new google profile. Not that big a deal, I just don’t trust them anymore.
The cost to upgrade your Google storage to 100 GB is $20 per year. Is that really a deal breaker? Maybe you’re refusing to pay anything to Google as a matter of principle, but that kinda seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face, given how much effort you’re apparently expending to find an alternative.
Yeah…or just create a new account just to write this memoir.
A text document won’t come within light years of filling up the free space you (OP) have on a new Google account. Just not gonna happen in your lifetime unless you really, really try to work at it (and then it would be an unreasonably long memoir…I Googled it and it would be in the realm of 10 million pages long so at 100 pages per day it would take you over 270 years to type that all).
Even if that limit was somehow reached you could download the whole thing and put it somewhere else. Or pay Google for more storage as @markn_1 mentioned.
Easy-peasy and free (almost certainly).
If you decide to also upload every photo and video you have ever taken or own to Google then that’s on you.
I will second the idea of Wordpress. I have paid for it over the years for extra features. But for now, I’m not paying anything and my blogs run just fine.
Why do you need an online backup? Physical backups spread around a little do just fine. I live my life writing about many aspects of it (trauma included), and I don’t use any kind of online storage. No need for it.
I have used Dreamwidth for years and have been very happy with it, and it’s got good privacy settings. It has a totally free tier.
(Though yeah, if I were writing a book and needed online backup, I’d set up a new account that wasn’t connected to anything else and thus wouldn’t use any additional memory, and use google docs, as @Whack-a-mole mentioned. Or something like simplenote.com, which is where I put drafts of stuff I’m writing, though I’ve noticed that when those texts get super long, the site can glitch a bit, so I’d make sure I had local backups too if I went with simplenote.)
Proton Mail has a free version with plenty of room for a manuscript.
For myself, I send a copy of my new draft and new notes to my author Gmail account as soon as I finish working on it. My MS is around 325+ pages long in current draft, and I’ve been backing it up to that account for a year. Still have plenty of storage space left.
