Overview
The shape of the app
The sidebar splits into three areas that follow the life of a piece of writing. Write is the work itself and the record of doing it. Plan is the story material behind the work. Publish is what happens after it is finished.
Almost nothing is required. A project with a title and a few logged sessions is a perfectly complete way to use Quilvo. The rest is there when you want it.
Write
The work and the record
| Projects | Any piece of writing you are working on: novels, novellas, short stories, poems, essays, screenplays, and more. A project carries its status, target, unit, genre, dates, and running count. |
| Drafts | Named, auto-versioned revisions within a project. Use them to mark milestones such as first draft, structural edit, or submission draft, without losing the history of what came before. |
| Writing sessions | One stretch of work: a date, a count, and optionally duration, session type, notes, and tags. Sessions are the raw material for every statistic, goal, and streak in Quilvo. |
| Series | Related projects grouped together: a trilogy, a collection, an article series. Series roll up combined word counts and completion progress, and can aggregate a shared cast. |
Goals and streaks
Goals are word targets over a period (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) or attached to one project, such as reaching a target count or finishing by a date. They track themselves from your sessions.
Streaks count consecutive days with words logged. Freeze days let you protect a streak through illness, holidays, and the rest of life without resetting to zero.
Plan
The story behind the work
Planning tools are deliberately lightweight: enough to hold cast and plot context, without turning Quilvo into a full outlining suite. Characters and codex entries belong to you, not to a single project, so a character can appear across a whole series.
| Characters | People who can appear across many projects. Only a name is required; role, pronouns, alias, a one-line hook, a colour, and custom fields are all optional. Link them to the projects they appear in with a per-project role. |
| Relationships | Typed links between characters (family, friend, rival, romantic, mentor, other) with a bond strength and an optional status note such as "estranged after Ch. 12". |
| Relationship map | An interactive constellation of your cast. Edge colour encodes relationship type, thickness encodes strength, and you can draw new relationships directly on the map. Scope it to everything, a series, or one project. |
| Codex | Worldbuilding entries for locations, factions, items, and lore. They work the same way characters do: reusable across projects, linkable, and searchable. |
| Timeline | Your story timeline, in fictional or real dates. Events can be free-text dated, grouped into threads, and tagged with the characters involved. This is story time, not calendar time. |
| Story maps | Maps of the places your story happens in. Pin codex locations, trace character journeys, nest regional maps inside world maps, and scrub through story time to watch events and eras appear. |
| Outline | A per-project structural planner built from chapters, scenes, and containers such as parts, acts, sequences, cantos, and stanzas, with the palette adapted to your project type. The outline is the source of truth for chapter and scene ordering. |
Publish
Getting it out into the world
| Markets | Your personal database of places to submit: literary and genre magazines, agents, publishers, contests, anthologies, podcasts. Capture guidelines, pay rates, and response times so you never re-research the same market twice. |
| Submissions | The journey of one piece to one market, from preparing through submitted, under consideration, shortlisted, and on to accepted, rejected, withdrawn, or no response. Payment and contract details live here too. |
| Contacts | A lightweight CRM for editors, agents, beta readers, and other industry connections. Log interactions and set follow-up reminders so relationships do not quietly go cold. |
| Alerts | A single list of things needing attention: submissions due a follow-up, contacts you meant to chase, goals approaching their deadline. |
How they connect
A submission joins a project to a market, optionally through a contact at that market. That is what makes the pipeline view useful: every piece in flight, where it is, and who is sitting on it.
Measure
What comes out of it
Because sessions, submissions, and goals are all structured data, Quilvo can tell you things you would not otherwise notice.
- Stats: writing volume over time, pace, best days, session patterns, and submission outcomes.
- Calendar: a real-world calendar of every date that matters, including scheduled submissions, follow-ups, response deadlines, and publication dates. This is distinct from the story timeline, which runs on fictional time.
- Earnings: payments and contract details recorded against submissions, so the financial side of the work is tracked alongside everything else.
All of it is reachable from your own tools through the JSON API or an AI assistant via the MCP server.