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.
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.
It already works
These are real screenshots of version 0.9, using the sample story that comes with the program. Nothing is mocked up.
The program's illustrated background was made by Jonathan Webb 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
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 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
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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