The rooms
Change rooms, change mindset.
A book is planned, researched, written, revised and published, and each of those wants a different frame of mind. Five Rooms keeps them apart and the project whole: choose a room at the top of the window, and everything in it is about that stage.
Plan
A corkboard of index cards, one per scene, with a synopsis, a point of view, a status and a label on each. An outliner with the fields you choose, and views you save. A beat board for Save the Cat, the Hero's Journey, three acts, seven points, Freytag, kishōtenketsu or your own sheet, with each scene's place in the book measured against the beat's. Collections that fill themselves from rules. And the story's own pages: cast and places, character studies, a timeline, a chronology, continuity checks, the shape of the book scene by scene, and a glossary.
Research
Notes, clippings, sources and pictures in their own column, with the scene you were writing left where it was. Clip an article from Safari with its citation; import references from BibTeX, RIS, CSL JSON or Zotero and cite them with a footnote. Each character gets a study page with prompts, photos and a record of every scene they're in.
Write
One scene, one chapter or the whole manuscript as a single page, in a typeface made for reading, with chapter openers drawn in. Bold, italic, small capitals, highlights, footnotes and scene breaks, kept as plain Markdown underneath, so your words are never locked in. Word targets for the book, the chapter and the session; writing sprints; find and replace across the project; read aloud from the cursor. A composition mode with nothing on screen but the page. Scripts are written in Fountain, with every element a keystroke away.
Revise
Checkpoints record the whole project; compare any two to see what changed, word by word, and restore what you need. Start a revision and the new words show in their own colour until you accept them. Margin comments with categories and colours, suggestions you accept or reject, and alternates of a scene kept side by side. Checks read the manuscript for repeated words, filter verbs, dialogue tags, overused words, tense slips, quotation marks and the common mistakes, and your own rules, as questions in the margin, never a grade.
Publish
A manuscript in standard format as Word or PDF, with a blind version for contests. An ebook that passes the checks stores run, with its front and back matter, copyright page and contents generated. A print interior with mirrored margins, running heads, folios and a cover template for the printer. An audiobook read by the system's voices or your own narrator, mastered to the usual levels. A submission pack: synopsis, pitch, logline, query letter. Every format is previewed before it's built and checked after, and the retail details are ready for the stores.
Begin in one room. Finish in five.
Five Rooms is coming to the Mac App Store and the App Store.