Devlog 007: A Studio Full of Rooms

Hello again, writers!

The last devlog went up the same day as the website. The studio has grown a lot since then, so this one is a tour of what’s new, roughly in the order you’d bump into it.

A desk that’s happy to see you

The dashboard got a makeover. It looks like a page from a decorated planner now: each card is taped in with washi tape and washed in its own pastel, and the cards finally line up in tidy rows.

There’s also a new resident. A small sticky note with doodled arms and legs sits in the corner and says something kind about your day. It waves in the morning, naps on your rest days, and cheers when you reach your goal. Reaching your goal also sets off a little burst of confetti, once a day, and never if you’ve asked for reduced motion.

Today’s progress is a sticker chart of five stars, and the week shows up as rainbow bars with a heart on every day that met the goal. Then there’s the Sticker book. Stickers come from your actual writing: your first words, a busy week, three days in a row, a thousand-word day, a late-night session. Once a sticker is yours it stays, and rest days never break a run.

Planning beside the page

The story grid has been rebuilt. Chapters or scenes run down the side, and the threads you’re tracking run across the top: main plot, romance, mystery and clues, foreshadowing, whatever you need to keep straight. Each thread has its own colour, and every cell holds notes, a status and an intensity from one to five.

Some columns fill themselves in from the manuscript, so you can see each chapter’s point-of-view characters, word count, scene status and places without typing any of it. Switch to the Thread map and every thread becomes a line across the book that rises and falls with its intensity. The subplot that vanishes for six chapters is very easy to spot.

You can also have it open while you write. The Write room has a split screen now: a second pane beside the page that can hold the story grid, any other planning tool, or another scene you can write in. Drag the divider to share the space however you like. No more running back and forth between rooms to check what you planned.

Cast, places and names

• Characters can link to one another as family, friends, rivals, mentors and more, and each link shows up on both characters.
• Filter your cast by role, from protagonist and deuteragonist to antagonist, love interest, mentor and sidekick.
• The character questions grow with your genre, with extra prompts for high fantasy and other worlds.
• Portraits: build a little character with the avatar maker, or upload your own art.
• A name generator with fourteen naming styles, from Regency to Elvish to starborn sci-fi, and categories that run from people and nicknames to gods, pantheons, tribes, noble houses, taverns and ships.
• A Locations tool for places inside places, linked to the scenes set there and pinned on maps you upload.

Rooms for your readers

The new Readers room is for the people who read your book before everyone else.

• Beta Mount (Studio and Atelier): share chapters with beta readers through a private link. They comment on passages, react, and answer the questions you ask after each chapter.
• ARC Mount (Atelier): a sign-up page for advance readers, approvals, private links and watermarked ebooks.
• Newsletter Studio (Atelier): a sign-up page for your readers, and letters you design from blocks.

Beta Mount and ARC Mount work today. Readers can already sign up for newsletters and you can design letters, but sending them needs one more piece behind the scenes, so the send button waits a little longer.

Books that look like books

• Print design follows KDP’s rules for bleed and the inside gutter, and the print edition can have its own design, separate from the ebook.
• Seventeen title page layouts, editable for both print and ebook.
• The table of contents in print now shows page numbers.
• Export covers the ebook stores and readers (Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Nook and Google Play), print files for KDP paperback and hardcover, Word, Markdown and plain text.
• Save and Save as keep a .draftmount copy of the whole book.
• Text conversations in your story show each sender’s name above their bubble.

Bring your book with you

If your book already lives somewhere else, it can move in without losing its formatting. There’s an Open button now, in the top bar, on the dashboard and in the Library (⌘O works too). It opens a .draftmount copy straight away, or reads in a manuscript from somewhere else.

• Word files keep their bold and italics, underlines, strikethrough, highlights, centred lines, block quotes, lists, links, footnotes and pictures. Chapters split at your headings and scenes at your scene breaks.
• Scrivener projects come in with their binder intact: folders become chapters, documents become scenes, and each document brings its synopsis and status along. Drag the .scriv project in, or choose a .zip of it.
• Rich text (.rtf), Markdown and plain text work too.

Your Research folder stays in Scrivener, and anything that can’t come across, like a picture in a format browsers can’t read, gets a short note so nothing goes missing quietly.

Help with the words, still no generative AI

There’s now an autocorrect and a grammar check. Both work from a set of rules, not a language model, and both run in your browser. Autocorrect fixes the classic slips as you type, like “teh”, “dont” and a lowercase “i”, and pressing Backspace straight away undoes a correction you didn’t want.

The grammar check underlines things like “could of”, its and it’s, then and than, and doubled words, and the Grammar panel can fix them one at a time or all at once. It won’t nag about how your characters talk inside dialogue unless you turn that on, and names from your cast never get “corrected”.

Make it yours

• A Settings button you can actually find, on the dashboard and in every room.
• Fourteen studio themes, plus accent colours, backgrounds and fonts. Atelier adds animated backgrounds like aurora, rain, fireflies and falling petals.
• Dark themes got a proper fix. Highlights used to turn a muddy mustard on dark backgrounds; now they lift gently instead.
• A full Accessibility section: reduced motion, stronger focus outlines, larger buttons, reading fonts and spacing, a spotlight on the paragraph you’re writing, and more.
• A Plan & billing page in Settings, ready for when paid plans open.

What’s next

Mostly listening. A lot of this is brand new, and I want to see how it holds up for writers who aren’t me. After that comes switching on newsletter sending and smoothing whatever rough edges turn up along the way.

And, realistically, fixing whatever I broke while adding confetti.

Until the next draft,

The Draftmount Developer