Updates
What is being built, and what each piece is for.
Bonafor is being built in the open by one person. Everything on this page already works. None of it is open to authors yet, and there is no date.
Nothing here is a promise about what comes next. A thing gets written up once it runs, never before, so this page is always a little behind the work. Some weeks have nothing worth writing down, and those weeks get nothing.
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One page for writing, with everything about the chapter beside it
Drafting happens on one page now: the prose, and a single panel next to it holding everything about the text. Tools are icons on a toolbar, decisions are words in menus, and every control has exactly one home instead of turning up in three places.
That sounds like tidying and it is the opposite. A drafting surface that keeps showing you its own machinery is a surface you operate rather than write in. The panel exists so the things you need while writing are within reach and the rest is out of the way, which is the only justification any of it has for being on screen.
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An editor's pass comes back as decisions
An editor works in a draft of the book as it stood when the pass began, and sends it back a chapter at a time or all at once. What arrives is marked changes, each one carrying who suggested it, which you accept or reject one by one or together. Insertions carry a mark as well as a colour, so the marking still reads if you do not see the colour.
The alternative is the thing every author already knows: a document that comes back unreadable, and a week spent working out what happened to it. Sending chapter by chapter means the work reaches you while you can still act on it. An author can also narrow what a coauthor is allowed to accept, down to particular chapters, particular scenes, or the scenes seen through one character's eyes.
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A whole book in, and the same book back out
Manuscripts come in from Word, from plain text and Markdown, from several files with a chapter to each, and from Scrivener projects read through their binder. The import is reviewed before it lands and picks up where it stopped. A whole book goes back out, and comes back in exactly.
Importing is not new and nobody should pretend otherwise. What matters is the round trip being exact, because that is what makes the freedom to leave worth anything. An export you cannot re-import is a souvenir. This one is held to thirteen awkward real shapes taken from actual books: hard-wrapped text, chapter numbers that restart, parts without chapters, headings that only look like headings, and a wall of text with no paragraph breaks at all.
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Two people in one chapter, and nobody's work disappears
Typing is saved as you go and every version is kept. When two people have been in the same chapter, the changes are merged a paragraph at a time. Different paragraphs both land. Where both people changed the same paragraph, writing pauses and offers Keep yours, Keep theirs, or Keep both, and the choice stays changeable until you finish. The page says who else has been in the chapter, by the name they go by on that book.
This is the case that quietly eats work everywhere else, usually behind a message that picks a winner without asking. A paragraph is small enough that the right answer is normally obvious on sight, and stopping to ask is better than a silent decision made on your behalf.
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Worldbuilding notes the scenes can point at
There is a vault: the characters, places, groups and secrets a book has to keep straight, held per pen name so a catalogue's facts stay with the catalogue they belong to. Entries are written the way a chapter is, can sit underneath other entries, and can be commented on in the margin. A scene names the ones it uses, so a card on the plot board wears its cast with the point of view ringed, and the board can be read by who is in a scene, where it happens, or which secrets are live in it.
The reason this is not a notes app bolted onto a writing app: the notes and the manuscript are in one place, so the plan can be read through the facts. Keeping those facts straight across a series is the actual work, and a separate document is where that work goes to rot.
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Where every chapter stands, and what other people did while you were away
The planner shows every chapter of a book and where it has got to, as a board with a column per phase or as a table. Tasks sit under the chapters they belong to, and you can add your own. My tasks gathers everything that is yours across every book. An inbox says what other people did on your books while you were elsewhere.
A book is not late because someone was lazy. It is late because the next step stopped being obvious, usually after a fortnight away from it. This is for the evening you sit down with an hour and no idea where you left off.
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What is planned but not yet written, said in a sentence
Gaps reports the distance between the plan and the draft: this much written, this many beats still empty, in sentences rather than codes. It reports and it never scores. There is no percentage, no total and no progress bar, and there is a test that goes looking for all three and fails the build if it finds them.
The refusal is the point. A count is a fact about how many things are true. A percentage is a grade out of a total nobody agreed to, and an unfinished book graded at forty per cent is a panel somebody switches off on the day they most need to look at it. An empty list is a real answer too, so a book you have only planned is told it is planned rather than told it is failing.
The reason the sentence is hard to say elsewhere is not cleverness. Plot tools hold the structure and writing tools hold the manuscript, and this sentence needs both trees at once.
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Every version kept, and notes that survive the book changing under them
Underneath all of it, every change is recorded rather than overwritten, so an earlier state of a book can come back, including a chapter you deleted and everything that was attached to it. Comments are anchored to a sentence, so when a chapter is split in two the note travels with the words it was about instead of drifting or quietly dying.
The sentence is the unit on purpose. A note pinned to a position in a file breaks the moment anything above it moves, and a note pinned to a whole paragraph is vague about what it was pointing at. A sentence is what an editor actually means.
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One real copy edit, walked through four ways of keeping versions
Before deciding how Bonafor would keep your drafts, one real editorial pass was traced through four different approaches: 1,847 changes, 12 of them overlapping each other, 3 already superseded by later ones, and a chapter split in the middle of the pass.
Two of the four were eliminated on that walk. The most instructive failure was the approach that promises to merge everybody's work automatically. In the published research behind it, one person's "frosty" and another's "soft" become "frostysoft". It does not silently pick a winner, which sounds like the better outcome, right up until you notice it has manufactured a third word that neither person wrote, inside a sentence of your book.
How a tool keeps your drafts is not a technical footnote. It decides everything the tool can offer you later: whether an editor's pass can arrive in pieces, whether a note survives the chapter it was attached to being split, whether anything can be undone a month afterwards.
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It can be wrong about where a sentence ends. It cannot lose a word.
Comments, marked changes and the gaps report all anchor to sentences, which makes the piece that finds sentence boundaries the most load-bearing thing in the product. So it was written against a corpus before it was written against a screen: 22 cases, 147 sentences, and a 694-word scene with dialogue, a scene break, an embedded letter and curly quotes the way Word actually produces them.
The rule that came out of it is the part worth stating plainly. It returns positions, never text. If it handed back the sentences themselves, an exact round trip would be a thing to test for, and a mistake could quietly alter a manuscript. Because it hands back positions, nothing is ever rebuilt from parts and the round trip is exact by construction. It can be wrong about where a sentence ends. It cannot lose a word.
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Nothing is printed on the page
Copies that go out to early readers carry a mark unique to each reader, so that a leaked book can be traced back. The obvious way to do that is a visible watermark stamped across every page, and that was specified, and then dropped. Somebody reading your book as a favour should not be reading a defaced copy of it.
What replaced it leaves the text a reader sees untouched. And until that is built, the claim stays exactly as true as it can be: every reader gets their own link, you can revoke it, and the log shows who opened it. Not "traceable". A security promise you cannot keep yet is worse than not making one.
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908 screenshots of other people's tools
Before any screen was designed, the competition was catalogued: 908 screenshots of the tools authors already use, sorted by what each one was doing rather than by who built it.
The point was not to find gaps to exploit. It was to borrow shapes. Where publishing already has a name and a layout for something, using a different one taxes every person who arrives. The subject with the most screenshots gathered is book formatting, and it is filed as reference rather than as something to build, because other tools already do it well and saying so costs nothing.
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The whole application was written down before any code was written
Fourteen areas of the product were specified in full, alongside the pieces that cut across all of them: security, accessibility, the file format, the interface other software talks to, and what becomes of your account if you stop paying. The technology was chosen last, on purpose, against requirements that already existed rather than the other way round.
Every decision carries a number and its reasoning. Where a later one overturns an earlier one, the earlier stays in place with a line through it and an explanation, so the argument survives instead of being quietly rewritten. That register is now past five hundred entries.
The reason for that order is not tidiness. A product designed while it is being built takes the shape of whatever was easiest to build. Deciding what happens to your manuscript when you cancel, before writing the code that stores it, is the only sequence in which that answer comes out honest.
The one thing you can do today
Help decide what this becomes.
The most useful thing right now is five minutes of truth about how you actually make your books. Fiction, nonfiction, academic, one book or twenty, published or not.