Projects & the Workshop

A project is one creative work (a novel, a novella, a collection), together with everything that supports it: outlines, characters, plots, world notes, and a glossary. You can keep as many projects as you like, each in its own folder inside your data directory.

The Workshop

Once a project is open you're in the Workshop, the main shell of the app. It always shows the active project's name and gives you navigation to every part of your work:

• Outline: the hierarchical structure of your manuscript
• Editor: write and revise the prose of a selected node
• Characters: your cast and their relationships
• Plots: plot threads and how they resolve
• World: locations, factions, items, and concepts
• Glossary: terms and definitions
• Project Settings: rename, edit the description, and author details (Settings covers app-wide preferences like fonts and spell/grammar check)

Switching and creating projects

The Workshop includes a project switcher that lets you:

• Open any other existing project
• Create a brand-new project (with the same template choices as the first-run wizard)
• Import a manuscript as a new project (see Importing Manuscripts)

Your projects are tracked in a registry so they always appear in the switcher, wherever they live in your data directory.

Project settings

Open Project Settings from the Workshop to manage a project after it's created; it's the Project tab of Settings (the Application tab holds everything that applies across all your projects).

Title & description

Rename the project or update its description at any time. These are used throughout the app and on your exported title page.

Author details

Each project can carry author information used when you publish:

• Real name
• Pseudonym: a pen name you can choose to publish under instead of your real name
• Phone and email

When exporting, you can decide whether the title page shows your real name or your pseudonym.

Editor features like spell check and grammar check, along with fonts and status colors, are app-wide settings shared by every project; see Settings for the full list.

How a project is stored

Each project is a self-contained folder:

<your-data-dir>/
  projects.yaml            # registry of all your projects
  <project-slug>/
    project.yaml           # title, description, author details
    outlines/              # outline structure + per-node prose
    characters/            # character sheets
    plots/                 # plot threads
    world/                 # world-building notes
    glossary/              # glossary entries

Because everything is plain text, your work is never trapped in a proprietary format: you can read, back up, or version-control it with ordinary tools.