The content of your Mote stories is now saved between sessions, allowing you to create longer stories that you can continue to develop in Mote over days, weeks, months, or years.

Recently we added the ability for you to scroll up and read the parts of your Mote story that have moved past the “horizon” of the top of your web browser. With saved story content, this means scrolling back to re-read parts of the story created across multiple sessions.

Saving your story content is easily the biggest change we have ever made to Mote, but it’s still just the beginning of what we have in store.

How it works

Starting today, when you open a story in Mote, a file is created on our servers containing a copy of all the characters you create, and everything you write. As you write, this file is kept up-to-date automatically, and the next time you open your story, there it will be. (And yes, when you delete a story, we delete this file, too.)

Your story content is stored in the same AWS data center in Oregon, US where Mote’s servers operate, and is encrypted in transit and at rest. Story files use the ubiquitous, public domain SQLite file format, so even if you wanted to take your story content out of Mote, it would be easily readable and editable using standard tools.

Stay tuned for the ability to export your stories’ files directly from the Mote UI, as well as additional data export and transfer options, including taking stories authored in Mote into Google Docs and Scrivener!

Note that the contents of previous writing sessions will not miraculously appear in your existing stories today. We weren’t secretly saving all of that behind your back!

What’s next

Persisting story content opens a lot of possibilities, and is the cornerstone of what we’ve been calling Mote 1.0. Expect a lot of incremental enhancements coming soon, including an editable table of contents, a dedicated reading mode, and live editing and tweaking. Our goal is for Mote to be the most-fun way to fill a blank page, whether you write fiction alone or with friends.