StoryLedger
It started with my reviews.
Not the ones about the story — those I can live with. The small ones. A name spelled two ways. A character whose eyes changed colour somewhere between one book and the next. A dog who aged three years in a single winter.
Every one of them was fair. And every one of them was mine.
The trouble isn't that writers don't care about these details. It's that by the time you're a few books in, the details live in six places at once — a notebook, a spreadsheet, the manuscript itself, and the increasingly unreliable filing cabinet between your ears.
So I built somewhere to put them.
StoryLedger is a story bible and continuity tracker. Characters, places, story threads, timeline, research and continuity issues, all in one place, for one book or a whole shelf of them. It runs on Windows, everything stays on your own computer, and it doesn't replace whatever you write in — I write in Scrivener and keep the story bible here alongside it.
Who it's for
Novelists. Series or standalones — it makes no difference. If the same characters, the same town or the same world turn up more than once, what you decided the first time has to still be true the next time. Even inside a single book, chapter three and chapter thirty have a habit of disagreeing.
Editors. If you build a style sheet for every manuscript — names, hyphenation, timeline, who has which scar, which way the dog's ear flops — this is that style sheet, except you can search it, filter it, and hand a clean record back to your author. Copy-editors, line editors and proofreaders all end up keeping the same notes. This keeps them somewhere better than a Word file, and it keeps each client's book separate from the next.
Readers who keep notes. You know who you are. You're the ones who write to us, and you're usually right.
What's in it
Characters — with as many roles as they actually play, their relationships, and the details that have to stay the same: hair, eyes, scars, markings, and yes, the dog's breed
- Places, story threads, timeline events and research, all linked to each other
- A continuity log: record the contradiction, attach everyone and everywhere it touches, and mark it fixed with the date, so you know it was dealt with and not just noticed
- Search across one book, or across the whole series
- A Scratchpad for craft notes that belong to you rather than to any one project — the way you write dialogue, the research you did once and never want to do again
- Writer Mode: it gets out of your way while you work, but stays ready to catch a note from whatever you're reading
Try it
Thirty days free. After that it's $39 once — not a subscription, not a renewal, not a seat. Buy it and it's yours.
Everything it does, and how to buy it
It's early, and that's rather the point
I'm building this in the open, and the writers using it are shaping it. The most recent update came from a writer who wrote to tell me my character roles were too rigid — one character, one role, which is not how characters work. She was right, and it changed that week.
If you try it and something annoys you, tell me. That's how it gets better.