A series is too big to keep in your head.

The promise

If I disappear, your books don't.

Verkilo checks your license exactly once, when you activate it. After that it never asks again — not for a feature, not for a login, not to confirm you're still allowed to open your own manuscript. Pull the network cable out and nothing changes.

Left alone, the only thing it ever asks a server is whether a newer version exists — once, at launch. It sends no license key and nothing about what you're writing; it fetches a version number and that's all. Turn down the update and nothing else happens.

There is one exception, and it's yours to switch on. A line editor can send a section to Anthropic, OpenAI or Google if you paste in your own API key — your key, your bill. That is the only path by which a word of your manuscript leaves this computer, and it does nothing at all until you set it up.

And every build frees itself. About ten years after I compile a release, that copy stops asking for a key at all — no network, no server, nobody's permission. Each new release carries its own date another decade out, so the switch only ever fires on a version I stopped updating. If I'm gone, that happens on its own.

I write military science fiction under two names and I have seven books out. I built this because I needed it. The promise above is the one I would want from someone else's software.

Read my story