Asten
Try the pre-alpha

Asten for novelists

In a long draft, details drift: an eye color changes, a dead man pours tea, a flashback lands in the wrong week. Asten keeps a record of what you settled and marks the pages that disagree with it.

Try the pre-alphaHow it works
A young woman in a yellow jacket trimmed with ermine sits at a table with a quill in her hand, turning to look out of the picture.

In short

Asten helps novelists keep a long manuscript consistent without handing their prose to an AI. You settle the facts that matter, and Asten marks later pages that disagree, such as a changed hair color, a character acting after their death, or scenes out of story order. It never writes or rewrites a sentence.

Common problems

The style sheet you stopped updating

You meant to keep a list of who has which scar. It stopped at chapter six.

Search-and-squint revision

Checking every mention of a name by hand, hoping you didn’t miss the one that matters.

AI that wants the pen

You tried an AI tool for help and it offered to write the scene. In a voice that wasn’t yours.

How Asten helps

Settle it once

Mira’s hair, Oren’s death, the day the harbor burned. Facts with sources.

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Red in the margin

When chapter 19 disagrees with chapter 2, you see both sides at once.

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Two clocks

Flashbacks, frame stories, and parallel threads, with story time and reading order kept apart.

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A desk you can live in

Binder, comments, find, page view, track changes, snapshots.

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A Tuesday in revision

  1. You rewrite chapter 19 in a rush. Mira “pushes her black hair out of her eyes.”
  2. A red mark appears in the margin: CANON-E013. Chapter 2 settled her hair as auburn.
  3. You remember: she dyed it in chapter 12 to slip past the harbor guards.
  4. You give the auburn fact an end date in story time, add the black one from chapter 12 onward, and the mark disappears. The sentence never changed.

Your page

Mira pushed her black hair out of her eyes and listened for the bell.

Your canon

Mira · hair · auburn

settled in chapter 2

CANON-E013Mira’s hair was settled as auburn.
  • ① Settled: Mira · hair · auburn
  • ② Chapter 19 says: “black”
  • ③ No event between an unplaced time and day 40 changes Mira’s hair.

Most likely slip: ② (93%)

Limits

  • Asten reads only plain attributes from your prose (hair, eyes, age, location, alive or dead, relations), and only when a name is in the same sentence. Anything subtler, you settle yourself.
  • It is a pre-alpha: release 0.0.1b for Windows and Linux, unsigned, with macOS later.
  • It won’t typeset your book. Compile to .docx for your editor or publisher.

Asten for novelists

Is Asten good for writing a novel?
Asten is built for long fiction. It combines a manuscript desk (binder, comments, page view, track changes) with continuity checks that remember the facts you settle, without ever writing prose for you.
How is Asten different from Scrivener?
Both organize a long manuscript in a binder. Asten adds a canon model and continuity checks that mark contradictions, and it is local-first with no account. It does not try to replicate every Scrivener compile option.

Asten for other writers

WorldbuildersScreenwritersFan-fiction writersAI tinkerers
Canon checksHow to keep continuity in a long novelThe deskCompare

Try the pre-alpha

Open the workbench in your browser on a sample novel, or download release 0.0.1b for Windows or Linux.

Try the pre-alphaDownload for Windows or Linux