- Date your scenes in the story’s own time. Give a scene a day, a month, a year or a time of day, and how long it lasts. Use the ordinary calendar, the Julian one, or build your own world’s months, weeks and eras. Say only what you know: “March 1866” stays a month, and nothing pretends it was the first.
- See the whole story four ways. A Chronology you can edit from the keyboard, a Timeline drawn to scale with lanes for books, plot threads or any characters and places you choose, a Subway map of who crosses whose path, and a Matrix of every scene against every character and location. Drag events to move them in time; zoom from hours to centuries.
- Events that happen off the page. Backstory, offstage battles, a character’s childhood: they live on the timeline with notes and links, and never touch your word count or your manuscript. Promote one to a scene when you decide to write it.
- Threads, ages and flashbacks. Color your plot lines and follow them through every book. Set a character’s birth and death and see their age in every scene. A scene set before the one ahead of it in the book is marked as a flashback.
- Continuity you can trust. Verkilo spots a character on stage before they’re born or after they die, someone in two places at once, and an undated scene between dated ones. Say “this happens after that” or “no sooner than a year later”, and Verkilo tells you when a date breaks the rule; one click moves it back, and Undo is always there.
- Bring your timeline with you. Import events from a spreadsheet (CSV), matching the names to your characters and places, and export the whole chronology back out.
Your story bible grows, too.
- Your own kinds of entry. Factions, ships, spells, artifacts: add any kind you need, each with its own page, icon and color, beside characters and locations, with links, facts, versions and relationships like the rest.
- Relationships between anything. A character and the city that made them, a faction and its rival: relationship arcs now join any two entries.
- Scene details, as simple as you like. Every group beside your manuscript folds away and stays folded, and Settings can hide the ones you never use: skip story time, dependencies or labels entirely, or keep them all. Your own kinds of entry get their groups there too.