One application to write them all.
Outline it, draft it, revise it and see it laid out as a finished book — every stage of writing a novel, in one application, on your own machine.
How much of it exists
32%
53 of 165 steps built toward 1.0.0-beta.1
The roadmap says how close it is. Nothing here says when.
Being written this week
- In progressThe screens still drawing their own controlsThe application · One button, one menu, one popover
Areas in motion
Workspaces
2/7
Structure
14/21
Write
16/31
Book
3/20
The application
11/24
What it is.
Writing a novel is not writing a long document. It is holding forty moving parts in your head at once and finding the one scene that is wrong. Every tool for it is either a text editor that has never heard of a chapter, or a project manager that has never heard of a sentence.
- 01
A manuscript that has a shape
Parts, chapters and scenes in one collapsible tree, with a distraction-free page under it. Move a chapter and the book moves. No cutting and pasting between files, no scrolling past forty thousand words to find the one scene you meant.
- 02
See it as a printed book
The same words laid out in fixed, print-accurate pages, zoomable and never reflowed. It is how you find out that your chapter breaks land badly, or that the thing you thought was a chapter is eleven pages long.
- 03
Snapshots, and a way to read them
Keep a copy of a scene because you asked for one, never on a timer. Then read it against what you have now, side by side with the unchanged stretches folded away, so you can take back one paragraph without taking back the afternoon.
- 04
Your book's own vocabulary
A serial says Arc and Episode where a multi-POV epic says POV Chapter. Templates set the structure and the words, and the menus, icons and page breaks follow, so the app speaks your book's language rather than making you speak its.
What it looks like.
The manuscript tree on the left, the page you are writing on in the middle, and whatever you need to consult on the right.
No screenshot yet. Nothing has been drawn in its place either.
Built in the open.
The whole roadmapEvery feature this application is meant to have is on one page, marked built, in progress or planned, with nothing left off it. It moves most weeks.
- Built· 53 steps
- In progress· 1 step
- Planned· 111 steps
A step is one piece of a feature, and steps are what this page counts. An item is a promise about a group of work, and finishing the first piece of it is not the same as finishing it. Nothing here is a promise of a date. It says what is done, not when the rest will be.
What to expect.
- A desktop application
- Windows, macOS and Linux. Not a tab, not a subscription to a website that might close.
- One file per project
- Your manuscript is a single file on your own disk. Back it up, move it, keep it in a drawer for ten years. Nothing here needs to phone home to open it.
- Nothing released yet
- No build exists that anybody but the maker has installed. 1.0.0-beta.1 will be the first.
- No date, and no price
- Neither has been decided. When they are, they will be said here first rather than promised here early.
Lately.
Every postBe in the first test build.
1.0.0-beta.1 is the first build anybody but the maker installs, and it goes to a small invited group. Leave an address and you are in it. One email when it is ready, and nothing else. No weekly newsletter, no launch countdown.
The list is not open yet. There is nowhere to put an address that would keep it.
- Watch it get built
53 steps built, 112 still to go, and every one of them named.
- Subscribe by feed
What got built and what turned out to be wrong. No address, no account, and nobody can take a feed away from you.