Sgeulai is pronounced SKAY-lee. It's Scottish Gaelic for storyteller, and it's the name I gave to the writing app I've been building. This is the first post on this blog, so it seems right to start with why it exists.
I write memoirs. [One or two sentences, in your words, about the first book where the pain started: which book, and what went wrong. For example, a date you couldn't pin down, a person who appeared under two names, or a detail you'd told one way in chapter three and another way in chapter twelve.]
A memoir leans on the truth and on a memory that's less reliable than you'd like. Behind every chapter is a pile of facts: who was in the room, which year, which house, who had already died by then. I kept that pile in notes, spreadsheets and my head. The manuscript itself lived somewhere else. Nothing connected the two, so when one changed the other didn't notice.
What I wanted
I wanted one place where the manuscript and everything I know about it live together, and where each checks the other. If I write that a character is nine in a scene set in 1987, the tool should know when they were born. If I mention a person the notes have never heard of, it should say so. If a chapter says one thing and my notes say another, I wanted to hear about it before a reader did.
Plenty of excellent tools handle one half of that. Some are good word processors and some are good organizers. I couldn't find one that treated the manuscript and the notes as a single document and kept them honest with each other. So I started building it. [Add a sentence on how it began: a weekend, a frustrated afternoon, or a particular book that tipped you over.]
Who it's for
I built it around my own needs, but I didn't want it to be only for memoirists. The same problem hits novelists, who have invented worlds to keep straight, and it hits series writers, who have to remember what book one revealed when they're deep in book three. It also hits anyone writing history or biography from real research. Sgeulai is for all of them.
Some decisions I made on purpose
- The app is free. Writing in it is free, the Story Bible is free and uncapped, and getting your work back out is free. What I charge for is the checking, the reconciliation between your manuscript and your notes.
- Every tool answers one narrow question and tells you which one. None of them tries to grade whether your book is "good." A clean report means a plot hangs together. It doesn't mean the plot is worth reading.
- It tells you what it does with your work. If a feature sends text off your Mac, the app asks first and says exactly what will be sent. Your manuscript is yours.
Where this goes
I'll use this blog to write about how Sgeulai gets built and about the craft of keeping a long book straight. [Optional: one line about what's coming next, such as a release, a feature or a how-to.] If you'd like to hear when something goes up, the newsletter signup is on the home page.
Thanks for reading.