Reference modules overview

In a long work, the expensive part is not typing. It is remembering. A supporting role who enters in chapter three should not change temperament by chapter thirty; a thread planted in act one should pay off in act five; “the old teahouse” and “the Yuelai teahouse” should not need a memory test to be the same place. Reference modules hold those decisions: six kinds of content, each one kind of fact, each citable from the draft, counted from your writing, and read by AI.

One rule of thumb: the draft is what happened, the library is what you have explicitly decided. So records do not grow by themselves—apart from two real paths (a speaker line files a character, a bracketed name files a prop), you create them.

The first five each have their own page in the left navigation; foreshadows live under Beats. That page is also the check-up for the whole work: the Pacing Density Curve over its Chapter Color Blocks, the Character Appearance Heatmap, the Item Appearance Heatmap, and the foreshadow board on one screen. The curve only folds together text volume, scene switches, cast size, location changes and prop references; it does not judge where your climax is.

A reference tag in world text, a name in a heatmap, a chapter block under the curve: they all open the same thing—a floating inspector on the right showing the summary, which you can promote to the full editor with “Expand Details →”. Characters, props, locations, chapters and world entries share it, so there is only one gesture to learn.

1. 1
   Peek

   The inspector shows what matters about that card plus minimal context, such as its direct sub-locations. A card with no name reads as Untitled Character, Untitled Location, Untitled Prop, Untitled Setting or Untitled Chapter.
2. 2
   Expand to edit

   “Expand Details →” opens the full editor, which is still each module’s own drawer or dialog.
3. 3
   Only characters use the right drawer

   Props, world entries and locations open a centred dialog by default. Only the character dossier and its relationship editor keep the non-modal right drawer, because you edit them while watching the canvas.

Prop colour, chapter colour, foreshadow colour and location colour all come from one 64-cell picker (8 hues by 8 shades, opened from the current swatch). New props, chapters and foreshadows rotate through the middle row, so you rarely pick at all; locations and foreshadows allow clearing it—after that a location has no colour and a foreshadow colours by importance. Characters have no colour field at all: the tier paints the card.

Names, aliases, tiers and belong-to relations are stored as identity, so renaming never costs you a find-and-replace. What does reach across modules is deletion: removing a character removes its relation lines, a location still referenced by the script cannot be deleted, and removing a plotline cascades to its events.

The six are not six islands: characters live in places and belong to factions, props pass between hands, events attach to one spot in the script and name what is involved, foreshadows anchor to chapters and scenes. Two kinds of link, two rules:

• Identity links (character–faction, place–parent, scene–location, citation–entry) store the object, follow renames automatically, and are protected against deletion.
• Information links (pointers between chapters, scenes, scene settings, blocks, settings, timelines and foreshadows) only locate and jump. They never rewrite the target module.

Full rules are in Entity mentions and @ and Cross-module links; per-module practice is in Characters, Locations, Props, World, Timeline and Foreshadows.

What these modules do not do: no automated story judgement, no nagging about who has been offstage too long, no auto-filled entries or categories, and no decision about who counts as your lead. Every statistic comes from the draft you wrote; every fact is one you saved.