Writing

The writing screen is the book open at one scene. The editor holds the scene’s prose, and the panels around it hold everything about the scene that is not prose. Which panels stand there is the layout’s business; the editor is always one of them.

The editor reads and writes the scene, not the book. Opening the screen reads the scene’s prose from the book file. While the read is running the editor says so, and where it fails it says what refused it and offers a retry. What you type is written back a moment after you stop, and again whenever you leave a paragraph, so the file follows your hands rather than a save button.

Everything you write is recorded as it happens. A run of typing is kept as one burst: where it started and ended in the scene, the characters it put there, the times it ran between, and the words the scene stood at when it ended. A paste is recorded as a paste, with the characters and a hash of them, and is never gathered into a burst. An import is recorded as an import, and text an AI lane wrote is recorded when you accept or dismiss it, so machine characters are counted once and never as yours. The record is what the History screen reads and what a published work is verified against; nothing on this screen writes to it twice.

The formatting toolbar sits under the scene title. Paragraph style (body, heading 1 to 3, quote), bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code, bulleted and numbered lists, scene break, link, image, footnote, comment, undo, redo, find and focus. The setting Toolbar chooses whether the row always stands, appears only on a selection as a bubble, or is hidden. On a narrow panel the groups after the lists fold away. Only formatting the file format carries is offered: no fonts, no colours, no alignment. Export decides how the book looks.

Focus mode fills the window with the editor alone. The toolbar, the prose at its fixed measure and the ruler stay; the bar, the other panels and the status bar go. Escape or Exit focus brings them back. The layout is untouched, so leaving focus returns the window exactly as it was.

The status bar says where the work stands. Saving or Saved and when, the Asterism’s entities and the proposals waiting, Guest while no account is signed in, and Online or Offline for the account service. Where the engine that keeps the book stops, the bar says Engine restarting and then Engine restarted; saved work is kept. Where it cannot come back, the bar says so in red: what was saved is in the book file, and closing and reopening the app goes on from there.

Footnotes and comments are anchored to the words they are about. A footnote’s mark sits after the word you left it on and its text stands in the list under the prose; footnotes are manuscript content and are exported. A comment is anchored to the span you selected and is kept in the book file for your collaborators; comments are never exported and never carried by forks.

A location opens the editor where something happened. A comment, a chat message or a notification can carry one: the scene it names, the text it was written against and where that text stood. Opening a location scrolls the editor to that span and lights it. Where the prose has moved on and no longer carries the text, the editor goes to the nearest place instead and says that the text this location named has changed, so a stale anchor is never silently wrong.

Annotate saved scene ties a fact to the saved text. The button under the scene title, and in the Scenes panel’s full view, opens a form over the scene as it was last saved: select the excerpt, choose the fact and the character, confirm the saved version and give a reason, then Review annotation and Accept. Unsaved editor text is left out and the form says so. A second press of Annotate saved scene closes the form, as does Close annotation at its end. Where the read or an acceptance fails, the form says why and Try again reads the saved scene again, keeping what you had filled in.

The Scenes panel is the chapter’s scenes in order. Each row carries the scene’s number, its title and its words against its target. Click a row to open that scene in the editor. New scene at the foot adds an empty one at the end of the chapter.

Its full view is the table that edits them. Rename in place, write the brief and the tone, set the target words, set the story date the scene stands at, and reorder by the arrows or the position field. The chapter column moves a scene to another chapter: the book is asked first, and where it refuses the move the table says so in the book’s own words and nothing is moved. Delete asks to confirm and moves the scene to the trash, which stands beside the table with Restore next to each scene in it. The side region shows the chosen scene’s brief, its numbers, the chapter it sits in and its first lines.

The background is the chapter’s cast. Where the constellation setting is on, the stars behind the writing screen carry the entities the open chapter names, the most mentioned of them largest, with the relations among them drawn between. Nothing sits under the text column.

Try: type a sentence into a scene and click away from the paragraph. Open History and the sitting carries a burst for what you typed, with the words the scene stands at after it. Paste a sentence instead and the same sitting carries it as a paste, counted apart from what you wrote.