Your story bible

Every novelist ends up with a pile of facts to keep straight: who has grey eyes, which town is a day's ride from which, when the storm hit. Galley keeps all of it right next to your writing, so it's there when you need it, instead of in a notebook you've lost or a document you stopped updating around chapter nine.

Each part of the bible is a tab on the book's top navigation, next to Editor . None of it appears in the finished book. It's scaffolding for the writer, and it comes down cleanly when the book ships.

Characters Locations Timeline World-building Style sheet Research

Characters

A page for each person in your story: their role, a paragraph on who they are, any other names they go by, and as many sections as the book needs. The aliases do more than they look. If you note that "the Captain" and "Renn" are the same person, Galley's name checker knows not to flag either as a misspelling, and typing @Renn or the alias both find the same character.

Every character, place and world-building entry is given a drawn mark, worked out from the row rather than uploaded. It is generated in your browser, so no name of yours is sent anywhere, and it stays the same when you rename someone.

A character page: role, aliases, the sections you named yourself, the chapters this character appears in, and the events they are in.

Sections

Add a section puts a named block on the sheet. Eight suggestions: Appearance, Personality, Background, Wants and fears, Voice, Relationships, Secrets, Arc. Or name your own. Sections can be renamed, reordered and deleted.

Each takes bold, italics, underline, lists and quotes. @ and # work inside a section, same as in the prose, and those links survive a rename.

In the timeline

The sheet lists the timeline events this character is in, beside the chapters. You tagged those events on the timeline itself; nothing is typed twice. Places get the same list, from the event's location.

Renaming someone

Change the name at the top of the sheet. Every tagged mention of that person changes with it, in the chapters and in the notes, and each chapter is snapshotted first so History has the version from before. Three things it leaves alone:

A mention tagged under an alias
stays as it is. Renaming Renn does not turn "the Captain" into "Renn".
Plain prose
gets counted and shown to you, not rewritten. The sentence doesn't say that word means this character, and it might be their cousin. One button replaces them all if that's what you want.
The old name
can stay on as an alias in one click, so the name check and the @ picker still know a word that's still all over your manuscript.

The cast overview

Overview sits at the top of the character list. A table of the whole cast: role, aliases, how many chapters of how many, a strip showing which ones, the mention count, first and last appearance, the longest gap, and who they share chapters with. Sort by any column.

You type none of it. It counts two things: the @ mentions you tagged, which carry the character's identity, and names and aliases as whole words in the prose. Useful for spotting a lead who turns out to be in four chapters of twenty-six.

Two things it doesn't count:

A name two characters share
goes to neither. The prose doesn't say which one it means. Tag those mentions with @ and it does.
A name you set to match manually
counts from tags only. That setting is for names that are also everyday words, and counting every "Will" in the book is what it was turned on to stop.

Front matter and back matter aren't counted. No AI, and nothing leaves your browser.

Locations

Every place your story visits, with the same sheet the cast has and the same appears-in-chapters tracking, counted from # mentions and the name in the prose. Drop a place into your prose with #. Renaming works the same way. The suggested sections are for a place: the look of it, sound and smell, weather and season, who is here, history, geography, what happens here.

Timeline

A scrollable line of what happens when, in your story's own dates rather than real-world ones. Link an event to the chapters, characters, and places it touches, and continuity errors get easy to spot: you'll catch it fast when a Tuesday should have been a Thursday, or when someone attends a funeral two chapters after they've left the country.

World-building

The big free-form material: the history, the magic system, the politics, the invented culture, the religion nobody in chapter one has explained yet. Anywhere your world is deeper than the page currently shows. Keep it here so it's consistent when you finally reach for it.

An entry has a category, a body you can format, and the same sections the cast and the places have. Suggestions here: the rules, who controls it, its history, where it shows up on the page, contradictions to watch.

Style sheet

Your personal rulebook for the small consistency decisions a manuscript is full of: "grey" not "gray", "OK" not "okay", whether it's "email" or "e-mail", how you hyphenate. Writing them down turns them from accidents you re-litigate every chapter into decisions you made once. It's the same document a professional copyeditor keeps for your book; here it lives beside the text.

Research

Research in Galley is a commonplace book, not a bookmark folder, and the difference is deliberate. What you take from a source is never the link. It's one passage: the ballistics of a 1911 pistol, the ferry timetable from Piraeus, the word the mill overseers were called. A link is a container you have to open again to get at the thing inside, which is why research folders in writing apps go quiet about a month in.

So a clipping has three parts:

  • The passage. Paste the sentence, fact or phrase you want. It's set in the reading serif behind a rule, so it reads as someone else's words, not yours.
  • Why it matters. Your own thinking: what it changes, what it explains, where it goes. This is the field you'll search for two years later, when you've forgotten the terminology but still remember the idea.
  • The source. Free text on purpose. Type it how you'd write it, Chandavarkar, Origins of Industrial Capitalism, p.94, with a link if there is one. Structure gets imposed later, if the clipping becomes a citation.

What a clipping can become

A quoted passage is rarely only research. An unfamiliar word is a glossary term; a fact you lean on in the prose is a citation; a song lyric is a legal obligation. Galley already keeps all three ledgers, so Use this on any clipping offers to send it onward with its source attached:

  • Add to the glossary. The title becomes the term, the passage its definition.
  • Cite this in the endnotes. The source becomes the note, and it numbers itself at export like every other reference.
  • This quote needs clearing. It lands in the permissions ledger as to request, with the passage attached. It never guesses fair use; that call is yours.

It copies onward rather than moving: the clipping stays where it is. And a destination greys itself out when the clipping is missing what it would need. No source, nothing to cite.

Deleting a clipping sends it to the Bin, recoverable for 30 days, like everything else you can delete.

Mentions: @ characters, # places

While you write, type @ and start spelling a character's name. A small list appears and narrows as you type, so @Ma finds Mara Vale, not Sister Aldith. Pick one and the name drops into your sentence, spelled right, every time. Type # the same way for a place.

  • It's clever about the names people actually go by. Type a nickname and the list shows who it belongs to ("Ma" and "Mom", under Claudia).
  • Type a name that isn't in the book yet and it offers to create the character or place on the spot, or to add what you typed as an alias of someone who already exists.
  • It's completely optional and never in your way. The menu only appears when you type @ or # at the start of a word.

Underneath, each mention is a real link, which is what feeds the appears-in-chapters lists. In the finished book a mention is just the plain name. No links, no marks, nothing a reader ever sees.

Comments

Reading back and want to flag something to fix later? Select the text and leave a comment: a soft highlight with a note attached. Open the comments panel from the status bar at the foot to click through them, mark them resolved as you deal with them, and, crucially, they never appear in the printed book. Notes to self, nothing more.

Glossary & references

These two reach into the actual manuscript, and they're how the back-of-book apparatus builds itself. The fastest way to add either: highlight a word in the editor and pick Glossary or References from the little menu that appears.

Glossary ●
A term and its meaning: invented words, foreign phrases, anything a reader might want defined. Every time you use a glossary term in the text it glows a soft green, so you can see it's tracked. At export, Galley builds an alphabetical glossary page at the back of the book.
References ●
A term that needs a source or citation. It glows red in your writing. At export, Galley numbers references per chapter, drops the little superscript numbers into the text, and builds a numbered endnotes page. Rearrange chapters and it renumbers everything for you. The full behaviour is in Preview & export.
Both ●
A term in both lists glows purple.
🎨 Those colours only show while you're writing, to help you see what's tracked. They never touch the words you wrote, and never print.