{
 "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
 "title": "Author blog",
 "home_page_url": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/",
 "feed_url": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/feed.json",
 "description": "Practical posts on continuity, timelines, beta readers and writing with an AI, from the team building Author.",
 "language": "en",
 "items": [
  {
   "id": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/why-long-stories-break-in-the-seams/",
   "url": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/why-long-stories-break-in-the-seams/",
   "title": "Why long stories break in the seams, and how to check for it",
   "summary": "The continuity errors that survive editing, why they happen in long books, and the small set of rules that catch most of them without reading the text.",
   "date_published": "2026-10-17T09:00:00Z",
   "authors": [
    {
     "name": "The Author team"
    }
   ],
   "tags": [
    "continuity",
    "product"
   ],
   "content_text": "Most continuity errors are not in a sentence. They are between two sentences that are two hundred pages apart.\nA character is on a ferry in chapter four and in a kitchen on the island in chapter four, a few lines later, because you moved a scene in the second draft. Someone names the writer of a letter in chapter five and learns who it was in chapter seven. A storm is over before it began. Each scene is fine alone. The fault is in the relation.\nWhy editing misses them\nEditing reads forward. You check a paragraph against the paragraph before it, and your memory does the rest, so the longer the book the more it relies on a memory that is wrong in the same places each time: the parts you rewrote. Beta readers catch some, usually the loudest. The rest wait for a reviewer.\nA short list of kinds of seam\nAlmost every error of this kind is one of a few:\n**In two places at once.** A character in two scenes that overlap, at different places.\n**Too fast.** A journey that takes less time than the way allows.\n**After the end.** Someone who died, back in a present-day scene.\n**Before the beginning.** Someone in a scene before they were born.\n**Out of order.** Times that circle: A is after B, B is after C, C is after A.\n**Knowing too early.** A scene that uses a fact the character has not learned yet.\n**One object, two places.** The only key, in two pockets.\n**The wrong day or the wrong weather.** A Tuesday that the calendar says is a Sunday; sun and rain in the same harbour at once.\nNotice what these have in common: they are rules over facts, not over prose. If you know where each character is and what they know at each moment, a program can check all of them.\nThe cost is the facts\nThat is the catch. The facts have to exist somewhere. A spreadsheet of who is where is out of date by chapter five, because it is a second job. The only version that survives is one where the facts come from something you were doing anyway.\nAuthor makes that trade explicit. You write scenes. After each, you mark what happened in it that changes someone: a journey, a reveal, an injury. Those events, plus the facts of your cast, are the facts. The state of a character at any moment is then worked out, not recorded, and the checks run on the same facts.\nWhat you get for it\nTwo things. First, answers: where is she at the end of chapter nine, what does she know, what changed between chapters five and nine and why. Second, a short list of seams with the rule that broke, the scenes involved and a button to jump to the first one.\nIt is not magic. If you never mark that Ilse learns the secret, no check can notice a scene that uses it. The checks are only as good as the events, and the events are only as good as the habit of adding them when the scene is fresh.\nA cheap way to start\nTake one subplot, the one you most fear contradicting itself. Mark its events only. Run the checks. You will find one or two real seams, and you will see whether the habit is worth extending."
  },
  {
   "id": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/track-what-your-characters-know/",
   "url": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/track-what-your-characters-know/",
   "title": "Track what your characters know: events, not notes",
   "summary": "A practical way to keep a secret straight across a novel: write it as events with effects, so a character's knowledge at any scene can be asked for instead of remembered.",
   "date_published": "2026-10-17T09:00:00Z",
   "authors": [
    {
     "name": "The Author team"
    }
   ],
   "tags": [
    "how-to",
    "story"
   ],
   "content_text": "Secrets are the engine of plots and the main source of their errors. A reveal works only if the reader, and each character, learns the thing at one point and not another. In a long book you will, at some stage, write a scene in which someone behaves as if they know what they cannot know yet.\nHere is a way to make that impossible to miss.\nWrite the secret as events\nTake a secret from your book: who wrote the letter. List the moments it changes who knows it:\nChapter 1: the letter arrives. Nobody knows who wrote it.\nChapter 5: Pieter suspects but does not know.\nChapter 7: Ilse learns who wrote it.\nChapter 11: Pieter is told.\nEach of these is an event with an effect on one or more characters: Ilse · knows + who wrote it. Give each event a place in the story: anchored to the scene where it happens, or a time.\nThen ask, don't remember\nNow the question "what does Ilse know in scene 5.3?" is a query. It folds the effects up to that moment, in story order, and lists the answer with the events that produced it. If you wrote scene 5.3 as if she knew, you can see at once that the event that teaches her is in chapter seven.\nThat is also what a check does for you. A scene can state a fact the character relies on; the check knows too early compares it with the moment the character learns it.\nMake facts small and plain\nEffects work best when they are short, plain statements: knows + the letter was hidden by the captain. They are for you and your checks to compare, not for readers. A long effect is a sign that you are writing prose in a field that wants a fact.\nNot only secrets\nThe same shape holds for other things that change:\n**Where** someone is: a travel event with a place.\n**Injuries**: add on the event that causes it, remove on the one that heals it.\n**Possessions**: the letter, the key, the knife.\n**Relations**: \"engaged\", \"enemy\", \"estranged\".\n**Mood or status**, when the story depends on them.\nHabits\nAdd the events when you finish the scene, while you remember what changed.\nPrefer many small events to few large ones.\nDo not backfill the whole book in one weekend. Start with the thread you are most afraid of.\nWhat it will not do\nIt will not find events in your prose. If you never tell it that Ilse learns something, it cannot know. That is a limitation, and it is the reason the answers are exact when they exist."
  },
  {
   "id": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/a-timeline-you-can-zoom/",
   "url": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/a-timeline-you-can-zoom/",
   "title": "A timeline you can zoom from the year to the minute",
   "summary": "Why a story needs both a long view and a short one, how folded gaps and reading order help, and how to use the zoom levels in practice.",
   "date_published": "2026-10-17T09:00:00Z",
   "authors": [
    {
     "name": "The Author team"
    }
   ],
   "tags": [
    "how-to",
    "timeline"
   ],
   "content_text": "A novel has two time scales that rarely look at each other. The long one is the arc: months, seasons, a year. The short one is the scene: a night, an hour, five minutes of an argument. Most writing tools give you only the first.\nWhen the two are not connected you get the errors you would expect. A character leaves the house at nine and arrives at a meeting at nine-ten, forty minutes away. A storm passes in a paragraph and lasts three hours elsewhere.\nFive levels\nThe timeline in Author zooms across five levels: year, month, day, hour and minute. At the top you see the shape of the book, strand by strand. At the bottom you see the minute-by-minute of the night that matters.\nYou do not need to enter minutes for everything. A time can be as rough as a year, or ~1923 for approximately, and it is drawn at the precision you gave it. Only the scenes that need detail need it.\nFolding the empty parts\nA book rarely fills its time evenly. There may be a gap of four years between chapter six and chapter seven, and a whole book in one night. The timeline folds the empty stretches into break marks, so the long gaps do not push the interesting parts off the screen.\nStory time or reading order\nTwo axes are available. Story time puts things in the order they happen, which exposes a flashback in the wrong place. Reading order lays chapters out by their words, which shows how the pages are spread. Switching between them is a useful test for structure: a thread that is rich in story time but thin in reading order is rushed.\nStrands as rows\nEach strand has its own row, so the timeline is also a map of what carries the book. A mystery that appears in chapters 1, 5, 8 and 11, and nowhere in between, is visible as a gap in its row. The board view shows the same strands against chapters for a coarser look.\nThe checks lane\nIssues from the continuity checks sit in a lane on the timeline, so you see the seams where they occur in time, not just in a list.\nA way to use it\nStart zoomed out and look at the shape. Is there a strand that disappears?\nPick the busiest night and zoom to the hour. Do the events fit the hours?\nZoom to the minute for the scene that matters most, and check the order.\nLook at the checks lane for anything flagged in that stretch.\nFifteen minutes with the timeline will tell you things that three read-throughs did not."
  },
  {
   "id": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/beta-readers-without-the-chaos/",
   "url": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/beta-readers-without-the-chaos/",
   "title": "Beta readers without the chaos: frozen versions and comments on the paragraph",
   "summary": "How to run a round of beta reading so feedback is about one version and attached to the text it is about, and how to compare rounds afterwards.",
   "date_published": "2026-10-17T09:00:00Z",
   "authors": [
    {
     "name": "The Author team"
    }
   ],
   "tags": [
    "how-to",
    "readers"
   ],
   "content_text": "A round of beta reading usually goes like this. You send a file to six people. Four reply in e-mail, one in a document with tracked changes, one in a voice message. By the time the replies arrive you have already changed chapter three. Now you are reading a comment about a sentence that no longer exists, and you cannot tell which file the reader had.\nYou can fix that with two ideas: freeze what readers see, and anchor their comments.\nFreeze the version\nBefore you send anything, save a version of the book with a name that says what it is: "round 2, after the ferry rewrite". The reader link in Author opens that frozen version, not your working copy. You can go on writing; they are reading round 2.\nChoose what to show\nYou do not have to send the whole book. Choose the chapters. A reader who only needs to look at the opening can have the first three chapters, which is also an easier request to say yes to.\nChoose the mode\nA link can be read only, or comment. In comment mode a reader selects words and writes a comment, adding their name. They do not need an account. The comment is attached to the exact passage, with the quote.\nOne address, shown once\nThe address of a link is shown once, when you make it. Copy it into your message then. If it is lost, make a new link. You can give a link a label (who it is for) and an expiry in days, and you can revoke it at any time. Revoking is the right way to end a round.\nRead the comments as threads\nComments come back as threads with the quote, the reader's name and the scene. Reply, and the reader sees your reply under their comment. Resolve what you have dealt with. Leave open what you have not.\nCompare rounds\nAfter the round, make another version and diff the two. The comparison is word by word and scene by scene, so you can check that the change you made because of Lotte's comment is the change you intended, and see how much you changed overall.\nA few habits\nName versions by round, not by date.\nTell readers what kind of feedback you want. A frozen version is the right moment for \"is it clear?\" and the wrong one for \"should this be a different book?\"\nDo not resolve a comment until you have changed the text or decided not to."
  },
  {
   "id": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/write-with-an-ai-while-the-book-keeps-the-facts/",
   "url": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/write-with-an-ai-while-the-book-keeps-the-facts/",
   "title": "Writing with an AI while the book keeps the facts",
   "summary": "How to let your own AI draft with a long book in view: read the state first, save a version, write with a revision, run the checks. And what Author deliberately does not do.",
   "date_published": "2026-10-17T09:00:00Z",
   "authors": [
    {
     "name": "The Author team"
    }
   ],
   "tags": [
    "mcp",
    "how-to"
   ],
   "content_text": "Writing with an AI has one failure mode that long books make worse: the AI does not remember. Every session starts with a summary you wrote, and the summary is shorter than the book. The AI drafts a scene in which someone knows a thing they do not know yet, or turns up in a city they left.\nAuthor has no AI of its own. What it has is a door through which your own AI can read the facts of the book and write into it safely. On the Premium and Max plans you connect Claude, ChatGPT or Grok through Geenius OS once, and the AI can do the following.\n1. Read before it drafts\nBefore writing scene 9.1, it asks for three things: the outline and the scenes around it, the state of the characters in the scene (where they are, what they know, what has happened to them) and the open issues. It is working from the same facts you would use, not from a summary.\n2. Save a version first\nBefore it rewrites prose that a person wrote, it saves a named version of the book. If the rewrite is wrong, you restore it. Restoring saves the current book first, so even a restore can be undone.\n3. Write with a revision\nA scene has a revision, a counter that changes when the scene changes. To replace text you wrote in the app, the AI must read the scene and pass the revision back. If you edited the scene in the meantime, the write is refused. It cannot overwrite a newer edit of yours by accident.\n4. Mark what happens\nA good draft comes with its events. The AI adds the events the scene implies, with their effects: who goes where, who learns what. That keeps the state honest for the next session, and it keeps the checks useful.\n5. Run the checks\nAfter drafting it runs the continuity checks and tells you what it broke. You see the rule, the scenes and the cause.\nWhat it does not do\nIt does not write without you asking. There is no model in Author that drafts on its own.\nIt does not resolve your readers' comments unless you ask.\nIt does not invent events from prose. You, or your AI at your request, add them.\nA first prompt\nUse Geenius OS and my Author account. Open my book, read the outline and the state of the protagonist at the end of chapter eight, then draft scene 9.1 as Markdown, add the events it implies, save a version first and run the continuity checks afterwards. Tell me what they found.\nA note on cost\nYour AI runs on your own subscription. Author sells no credits. What the plan buys is the connection and the number of books."
  },
  {
   "id": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/six-outline-templates-compared/",
   "url": "https://author.geenius-os.tech/blog/six-outline-templates-compared/",
   "title": "Six outline templates compared: when to use which",
   "summary": "Three acts, the hero's journey, Save the Cat, seven-point structure, Freytag's pyramid and kishōtenketsu: what each is good for and when it gets in the way.",
   "date_published": "2026-10-17T09:00:00Z",
   "authors": [
    {
     "name": "The Author team"
    }
   ],
   "tags": [
    "comparison",
    "structure"
   ],
   "content_text": "An outline template does not write your story. It gives you a set of questions about where things should happen, so you can see when a book is lopsided. Author includes six, and each can be applied as a ready-made structure strand with one beat per beat, with a target position in the book.\nThis is a short comparison of what each template asks of you.\nThree-act structure\nSet-up, confrontation, resolution. The shape most stories already have. It is the least demanding template and the easiest to fit to almost any plot. Use it when you want a rough check that the middle is not too long.\nThe hero's journey\nTwelve stages in three movements: departure, initiation and return. It suits stories about a protagonist who leaves the ordinary world, is changed and comes back. It can feel forced for stories where nobody leaves or comes back.\nSave the Cat\nFifteen beats, each placed at a share of the pages. It is the most specific template and gives you the most to check against: where the catalyst falls, where the midpoint falls. It was written for screenplays and carries that rhythm, so novels may deviate on purpose.\nSeven-point structure\nStart with the end, then the middle, then the turns. You decide the resolution first and work back. It suits writers who plot from the ending and mysteries where the answer is fixed.\nFreytag's pyramid\nFive acts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, catastrophe. A classic shape for tragedy. It gives the climax a place of honour in the middle and a long fall after it, which suits some stories and punishes others.\nKishōtenketsu\nFour acts without conflict at the core: introduction, development, twist, reconciliation. A reminder that a story can run on surprise and juxtaposition. It is the most different template and the most useful when you suspect your plot is propped up by conflict it does not need.\nHow to use a template without being used by it\nApply a template to see the beats as a strand against your chapters.\nAssign each beat to the scene that does that job. Where no scene fits, ask whether the book has a gap or the template is wrong for it.\nRead the *beat off its mark* information. It is not an error. It says \"this beat is far from where this template expects it\", and you decide whether that is a problem.\nRemove the strand when it has done its job.\nTemplates are rulers. Use them to measure, not to decide what to write."
  }
 ]
}