When it happens, not just where it sits

Your binder is the order a reader meets the story. The Story Timeline is the order it actually happened: across every book in the series, including the parts you never put on the page.

Dates the way you know them

Give any scene a date in the story’s own time, and say only what you know. “March 1866” stays a month, and Verkilo never pretends it was the first. “1898” stays a year. A duel can happen at 4 pm, and a siege can last three weeks.

• Your calendar: the ordinary one, the Julian one, or your own world’s months, weeks and eras
• Lengths: type “3 days” or “until 1777” and see the span as you type
• Locks: pin the dates that canon has settled, so nothing moves them by accident
• Ages: set a character’s birth and death, and see how old everyone is in every scene

Four views of one story

The Chronology is every event in the order it happened, with its date, book, threads and who was there. It’s a table you can drive from the keyboard: type a date, press Enter, and you’re on the next row.

The Timeline draws the story to scale, from hours to centuries. Give it lanes for your books, your plot threads, or the characters and places you pick. Drag an event to move it in time, drag several at once, or drop one on a lane to add it to that thread.

The Subway turns each character into a line through the story. Where lines meet, those characters share a scene, so you can see at a glance who crosses whose path, and who hasn’t met anyone in three books.

The Matrix lays every event against every character or location, with each one’s role in the scene. Click a cell to change who’s there.

Events off the page

Backstory, a war that ends before chapter one, a character’s childhood, a battle your hero only hears about. These go on the timeline as events off the page. They have notes, links and history like any scene, but they never touch your word count, your exports or your manuscript. When you decide one deserves a scene after all, promote it into a book.

Continuity that watches the dates

Verkilo checks what the dates imply and tells you in the Continuity panel beside your manuscript:

• a character on stage before they’re born, or after they die
• someone in two places at once
• an undated scene sitting between dated ones
• a broken rule you set yourself: “this happens after that”, or “no sooner than a year later”

Click a finding to jump to the scene. A broken rule fixes with one click, moving the date that changed least recently, and Undo is always there. If a finding is deliberate (a ghost, a time traveler, an unreliable narrator), dismiss it with a note, and it stays dismissed until one of the dates changes.

Bring it in, take it out

Import events from any spreadsheet saved as CSV. Verkilo reads the columns, matches the names to your characters and places, asks about any it doesn’t know, and shows you every row before anything is saved. Export the whole chronology the same way, for your series bible, your editor, or your own spreadsheet.