Privacy that actually means something
Your unpublished manuscript never leaves your machine. No third-party retention policies to read. No worries about training data leaks. Especially relevant if your book is under contract or based on real people.
Local AI for novelists.
Your draft is your most valuable creative asset. Cloud AI tools send it to someone else's server every time you ask for a rewrite. Local AI keeps it on your machine, runs without per-token billing, and works offline. Here's why it matters, what you need, and how to set it up.
No token meter
Cloud AI pricing scales with how much you write. Local AI costs you electricity. Across a multi-book series, the difference is hundreds of dollars.
Works offline
Travel, weak connections, or just personal preference — local AI is available wherever your laptop is. No internet required after the model is downloaded.
What you need
Hardware: 16 GB RAM is comfortable for the recommended 7–8B-parameter models. Apple Silicon (M-series) and PCs with a recent NVIDIA GPU run dramatically faster than CPU-only systems. If you're on an older laptop, smaller models still work — they're just slower and shorter-form.
A local-AI runner: either Ollama or LM Studio. Both are free. Ollama is command-line-friendly and headless; LM Studio has a GUI and is easier to start with.
A writing app that talks to it: PlotForge Desktop connects to either runner. Drafting, refining, Scene Surgery — all routed locally.
The honest tradeoffs
Local AI is fundamentally different from a frontier cloud model. A 7B parameter model running on your laptop will not produce prose as polished as Claude Sonnet or GPT-4. Generation is also slower — single-paragraph rewrites that take 2 seconds in the cloud might take 20 locally.
But for novelists who think of AI as a structural assistant — outlining, scene planning, consistency checking, light revision — modern local models (12B+ on capable hardware) are genuinely good enough. And the privacy + cost story is hard to argue with.
The pragmatic split: if you want frontier-quality drafting, use PlotForge Web with bundled cloud AI. If you want privacy and one-time pricing, use PlotForge Desktop with local AI. Both are first-class.
Ready to try it?
Download PlotForge Desktop ($79 one-time, 14-day free trial) and follow either runner guide to be writing locally in under 30 minutes.
Setup guides: Ollama · LM Studio · Why we built PlotForge Desktop