Asterism

The Asterism is the book’s story bible, drawn as a graph. Every entity the book knows is a node, every relation a line between two, and every group a shape drawn around its members. It is the second main screen of an open book, opened from the top bar, and it reads the same book the editor is writing.

Nothing on the graph is written without you. What the checks, an import or an AI lane would add arrives as a proposal and waits on the proposals surface of the screen, where Accept writes it and Dismiss refuses it for good. A proposal that would add an entity offers the kind before it is accepted. The queue in the Review panels is the same one, and it has its own entry.

As of chapter reads the book at one chapter. The rail along the view is a slider over the chapters; parked at the whole book it shows everything, and moved to a chapter it shows the book as it stood there: entities the prose has not named yet are absent, facts show the value they held, and a relation that had ended is drawn as ended. Story evolution opens at the chapter the rail is parked at, and parks the rail where it left off on the way back.

Entities are carried by drag at any time. There is no mode to enter: drag a node and the placement is stored on that entity. Arrange offers placements to try, Balanced, Spread out, Close together, By kind, By group and Chart placement, each previewed before Keep this arrangement stores it. A node with no stored placement is placed by the chart.

Names shows every label at once. A book of twelve entities or fewer opens with the names showing; a larger one shows a name on hover or focus. Press Names to choose, and the book keeps your choice. Where two names would overlap on screen, the star with more mentions keeps its name (on a tie, the one created first) and the other name shows on hover or focus; its star stays visible and pressable.

Home shows the whole chart above the bar. At rest, and after 0, a double click on empty sky, Home or the last Escape, the view fits every star into the part of the window above the bar at its foot, at any window size and interface scale. Resizing the window refits a view you have not moved; a view you moved keeps its middle. Home stands in the bar at every window width, with its key, 0, in its tooltip.

Find a star and the minimap move the view. Find matches names and aliases and takes the camera to what you pick. The minimap shows the whole chart with the part you are looking at marked, and Display holds the view’s own settings: labels, star size, glow, edge strength, motion and whether the group shapes and the minimap are drawn at all. They are settings of the application, not of the book.

Opening an entity opens its sheet. The sheet is a card over the graph, edited in place, and Open as a page gives it the whole screen. What the sheet holds is in the Entity entry. Advice and Threads beside the graph are readings rather than edits: advice is what the checks noticed about the Asterism, and threads are the plot lines planted and not yet paid off.

A published work’s Asterism is read only. Opened from the reader, it is the work’s own graph clamped to the chapter being read, with no editing at all, and the way out is back to the reader.

Try: park the rail at the first chapter, watch the graph thin out, then drag one entity somewhere of your own and move the rail back to the whole book. The placement stays where you put it.