The timeline of your book, without rereading your book.
Every novel keeps a clock, and almost none of them keep it written down. Three days later, the next morning, at first light, that Tuesday in March: the statements are already in your manuscript and they are scattered across four hundred pages. This draws them as one picture of your book's clock - where it leaps and where it goes quiet - and lists every one of them underneath it, in order.
Try it freeSeven kinds of statement, drawn and listed.
The shape of your book's clock
Before the list there is a picture of it: your manuscript from first page to last, a mark for every expression, the ones that move the clock above the line and the ones that only place it below. A mark is as tall as its jump is long, so an eleven-year leap and an hour later do not look alike, and a stretch of chapters that never says when is a gap you can see. It is the one thing a list of four hundred rows cannot tell you.
Measured steps
"Three days later", "an hour earlier", "two years ago". Where the quantity can be measured the row carries its length, so a step of three days and a step of three years do not read alike. Where it cannot - "a few moments later" - the row carries no length rather than a guess.
Scene changes
"The next morning", "that night", "the following day". These say the book has moved without saying how far, which is most of how a novel actually keeps time, and they are the commonest kind in every manuscript we measured.
Times of day, days, dates and seasons
At dawn, half past four, Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of May, that winter. The harder half of this is not finding them but refusing the words that only look like them: "may" is a verb far more often than it is a month, "march" and "spring" are verbs, and the March Hare is not a date.
Spans measured from something
"Three years since the war", "a week after Eve arrived", "a month before the wedding". These are the one shape here that says how far the story has come from a fixed point rather than from the scene before it, which is what makes them worth reading twice in a book covering a long stretch. The row carries the length, which way it points and what it was measured from.
Chapters the clock never reaches
Which of your chapters carry no statement about when they happen at all. A reader with nothing to measure a scene against has to take it as happening now, and that is a choice worth making deliberately rather than by omission.
Nothing on it is called a mistake
Every row is a quotation from your file with the place it was found at, and none of them is marked as work to do. A novel is allowed to jump, to double back, and to let a character misremember a date out loud, and no fixed rule can tell any of those from a slip. What the report removes is the reading, which is the part that stops the check being run.
Where this helps.
Scenes get reordered, merged and cut, and the time markers stay where they were. This is the list to read after structural work.
Working out how much time book two has to account for, from what book one actually said rather than from memory.
A plot that turns on when something happened needs its clock to hold, and readers of the genre check it.
A continuity reader builds this list by hand as their first pass. Handing it to them instead is an afternoon of their time you are not paying for.
Questions about this report.
Does it work out what date each scene happens on?
No, and it is important that it does not. Chaining "three days later" into an absolute calendar means knowing which statements are the narrative present and which are a memory, a plan or a flashback, and no rule can tell those apart. It reports what your book says, in the order your book says it, and leaves the arithmetic to you.
Will it find my timeline errors?
It will show you your timeline, which is the thing that makes an error findable, and it will not tell you which row is wrong. We built a check that tried to - it compared two statements measuring the same span - and then ran it over three thousand published novels, where every single thing it found was wrong. A span measured from a past event grows as a book advances, so two statements about it are supposed to disagree. It was cut rather than shipped, and the reasoning is in the code where it used to be.
Is any of this AI?
No. Every row is a quotation from your file with the position it was found at. The word lists and the rules are fixed and written down, which is why a row can always be checked by searching your own manuscript for it. A language model asked the same question produces findings in the same shape whether or not they are in your book.
My book has no dates or days in it at all. Is that a problem?
No. Science fiction and secondary-world fantasy usually keep time entirely in steps and scene changes, and both are counted here. What the report will show you is how much of the book is placed at all, which is a different and more useful question than whether you used a calendar.
What if my book is very long?
The listing is capped, and where it is cut the screen says so rather than letting a shorter timeline read as the whole one. The counts above it are measured on all of them.
Other features.
Term clustering
Points at the passages where one invented word of yours falls far thicker than usual.
Learn more →Compare two drafts
Upload an earlier draft, or load its JSON export, and see what your world gained, lost and renamed.
Learn more →Series check
Scan the next book and see the names, spellings and style decisions the two books do not share.
Learn more →See the clock your book is already keeping.
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