Library of Living Stories
Coming to Kickstarter in early 2027

A home for your whole story

Your manuscript, your world and your finished book, kept together on your own computer. With a Librarian who reads, remembers, and never writes.

See what it does

Illustration by Jonathan Webb, made with the help of ChatGPT

Every long story keeps a library behind it

Who is related to whom. Which stair is broken. The night the old keeper died, and who knows the truth about it. Library of Living Stories is a desktop writing program that keeps all of it in one place, works with no account and no internet, and never locks your book away.

Novels and series

Standalone novels and whole series in one library. A series shares one Story Bible, with room for book-by-book exceptions.

Write

Chapters and scenes, a corkboard, versions you can compare and restore, focus mode, and autosave the moment you stop typing.

Remember

A Story Bible for characters, places, objects and rules. Every fact is canon or a note, and knows which book it belongs to.

See the shape

What each scene is for, how the plotlines run, the story's own calendar, and who knows what, and when the reader finds out.

Revise

Repeated words, long sentences, filter words, and a proofreader that adds your invented names to the Story Bible instead of flagging them forever.

Publish

An exact print preview, a print-ready PDF, an e-book, a Word file, and a cover with the right spine width.

Keep it safe

Automatic and encrypted backups, a repair tool, and export at any time. Your work is never held hostage.

How the Library works

  1. Write

    Chapters and scenes, corkboard, versions, autosave.

  2. Record

    Characters, places and rules in the Story Bible, as canon or notes.

  3. Ask (optional)

    The Librarian reads on your computer and proposes, with quotations.

  4. Decide

    You approve, edit or reject. Nothing becomes canon without you.

  5. Publish

    Print-ready PDF, EPUB, Word and a cover with the right spine.

Everything stays on your computer. The Librarian is optional, and it never writes your book.

It already works

These are real screenshots of version 0.9, using the sample story that comes with the program. Nothing is mocked up. Select a screenshot to see it full size.

The manuscript screen: a list of chapters on the left, a corkboard of scene cards in the middle, and the text of a scene on the right.
Binder, corkboard and page
The Story Bible open at a character, Ines Marlow, with her canon facts and a character questionnaire.
The Story Bible
The Who knows what screen, listing a secret Ines knows and something Tobias suspects, with the scenes where each learns it.
Who knows what, and when
The print preview showing a typeset two-page spread beginning Chapter 2, The Inspector.
The exact print preview
A 3D view of the finished paperback with its title on the cover.
Your finished book, in 3D
Setting up the Librarian: a list of AI models with download sizes, marked by whether they fit the computer's graphics card.
Setting up the Librarian

The program's illustrated background was made by Jonathan Webb with the help of ChatGPT.

A hooded figure in robes covered with handwriting holds a stack of old books, surrounded by floating pages and glowing letters in a candlelit library.
The Librarian. Illustration by Jonathan Webb, made with the help of ChatGPT.

The Librarian never writes

It reads your book, remembers it, and points to the page. It never writes a word of it.

The Librarian is an optional assistant that runs on your own computer. If you set it up, it can read your chapters, propose entries for your Story Bible, answer questions about your book with the passages it used, and point out where the story contradicts what you've decided. Nothing becomes canon until you approve it, and nothing you write is sent anywhere.

Where AI is used, honestly

  • In the program: only the optional Librarian, using open-weight models you choose to download.
  • In making the program: I wrote the code with an AI coding assistant. I designed it, made every decision and tested it.
  • In the artwork: I made the illustrations with the help of ChatGPT.

What exists, and what the campaign will build

Today

Works today (0.9)

  • Series and books in one library
  • Manuscript editor and corkboard
  • Story Bible and story structure
  • Print PDF, e-book, Word and cover
  • Backups and the optional Librarian
The goal

The campaign goal

  • Freelance developers to review the code and build with me
  • Signed installers for Windows and macOS
  • Testing on a real Mac and Linux
  • Testing by screen-reader users
  • Version 1.0, planned for June 2027
Stretch

If we go further

  • The Custodian: an optional cloud assistant using your own key (potential providers: Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Gemini)
  • Studies (not promises) for sync and a tablet/mobile/browser companion

Why I built it

Library of Living Stories began while I was struggling to write my novel, Alice – The Broken Kingdom. The name comes from my favourite place in that book. I built it as the place I wanted to write in: everything about a story, kept together on your own computer, with a Librarian that reads and remembers but never writes. Now I'm raising money to bring in other developers and make it a release you can trust.

— Jonathan Webb (who writes as Tyler John)

Letters from the Library

A letter every two weeks: the program as it is, what's being built, and the Kickstarter date and early founding prices when they're set. No spam, and your address is never shared or sold.

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