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The Manual

Documentation

Story Management

The Desk is your story library. This page covers creating stories, organizing story elements, the file system inside each story, and export options.

The Desk — your story library

All your stories live at /stories. Each card shows the story's genre tags, tense, language, mood, time period, POV, word count, and last-edited date. Click Continue writing on any card to open it.

Creating Stories

+ New Story

Start from a blank slate. Configure title, description, genre, tense, language, mood, time period, and POV during creation.

  • • Genre and tone
  • • Point of view
  • • Tense and language
  • • Target word count
  • • Banned words list

Import from Text BETA

Paste or upload an existing manuscript (DOCX or TXT, up to 500,000 words) at /stories/mine. AI extracts a title, description, genre, characters, locations, items, and timeline events, and splits the text into chapters.

  • • Step 1: paste or upload, then run the miner
  • • Step 2: review and edit everything it found before creating the story
  • • Requires an API key or the free LLM opt-in; can take a few minutes on longer manuscripts

Fork a Universe

Start from a public worldbuilding template in Universes. Forking pre-populates your story with characters, locations, lore, organizations, and events from that world.

Inside a Story

Every story has a left panel with two types of content:

Story Elements

Characters

Profile, dialogue style, relationships

Locations

Settings, atmosphere, descriptions

Lore

World-building, history, mythology

Organizations

Groups, factions, institutions

Items

Objects, weapons, tools, artifacts

Events

Plot points, timelines, consequences

Species

Races, creatures, and their traits

Notes

Free-form notes for anything else

Story Rules

Standing instructions Ash always follows for this story

Content

Chapters

Your story text — rich text editor with AI tools. Each chapter is Canon or Sandbox (drag it between the two groups in the file browser): Canon chapters feed Ash's context, Sandbox chapters never do, so you can draft side material or alternate scenes without it leaking into generation.

Outline

Per-chapter beat sheets plus a whole-book Story Skeleton and chapter map. See Outline-Driven Writing.

@-reference system

Type @ inside any text field to reference a character, location, or item by name. Ash reads those referenced elements during generation to maintain continuity.

Word Count Tracking

  • • Per-story total shown on The Desk cards
  • • Per-chapter word count
  • • Target word count progress
  • • Story stats: Total / Owned / Shared
  • • Last-edited date on each card

Story Home: Manage & World at a Glance

Every story has a home page with a Manage card and a World at a Glance card.

Manage

  • • Story settings — genre, tense, language, mood, time period, tone, POV, and banned words
  • • Delete story — permanently remove the story
  • • To rename a story, edit the title inline at the top of the page

World at a Glance

Live counts of every world element — characters, species, locations, items, lore, organizations, and timeline events — linking straight to that section of the World tab.

Project Checkpoints

Version History snapshots one chapter at a time. Checkpoints work at the level of the whole story — story settings, every chapter, the full World tab, and your Outline beats, saved together as one restorable point, so you can return to a known-good state after a session that went wrong, not just one edit.

Open a story's Files view and click Checkpoints in the header. Name the checkpoint (optional) and save it. Restoring one shows exactly how many chapters, world items, and beats it will bring back before you confirm.

Non-destructive: saving a checkpoint never touches your current work, and restoring one first saves a safety checkpoint of your current state, so a restore is never a one-way door. Deleting a checkpoint only removes that snapshot pointer, the chapter versions it points to stay in Version History either way.

Publishing to the Community Hub is pinned to a checkpoint. Pick which checkpoint goes live from the Publish panel, readers see that version until you publish a different one, so you can keep drafting without changing what's public.

Export Options

EPUB

Reflowable, with your cover, ready for e-readers and Kindle

PDF

Fixed pages with page numbers, for print and proofing — choose a trim size like 6×9 or 5×8

DOCX

Chapters as Microsoft Word, manuscript formatting preserved

TXT

Plain text chapters — universally compatible, smallest file size

ZIP

Every chapter plus every story element, organized in folders

Universes

Universes are public worldbuilding collections available at /universes. Each universe contains pre-built story elements (characters, locations, lore, organizations, items, events) for a specific fictional world.

Forking a universe

  • • Browse by genre (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Cyberpunk, Romance...)
  • • Click any universe to see its elements
  • • Fork to create a new story pre-loaded with that world
  • • All elements are yours to edit after forking

Creating a universe

  • • Click New Universe to create your own
  • • Add elements exactly like a story
  • • Publish it publicly for others to fork
  • • Request a universe via the submission form