The Story Atlas

The Story Atlas is Quarkle’s memory of your book. It holds notes on your characters, your world, and what happens in each chapter. This is what lets the rest of the Creative Companion know who’s who when you ask a question or run a review. It keeps itself up to date as you write.

​

Overview

The Atlas is a set of notes in folders. Quarkle builds most of them for you by reading your manuscript.

​

What’s inside

The System folder is always there, and Quarkle keeps it in sync:

• Knowledge map (overview.md): an index of everything Quarkle knows about your book.
• Book notes: book-wide metadata and direction: setting, arc, themes, anything true of the whole manuscript that doesn’t fit a Character, World, or Plot note. Quarkle writes here as you chat, the same way it writes Memory, and you can edit it directly too.
• Your preferences (memories.md): the things you have asked Quarkle to remember. See Memory.

Just below System sit two per-chapter branches: Chapter Summaries and Chapter Notes. See Chapter Summaries and Chapter Notes below. Further down, Quarkle creates notes for the characters, places, and plot threads it finds in your writing. You can add your own notes and folders too.

​

Chapter Summaries and Chapter Notes

These live in two branches of their own, below System, one entry per chapter.

• Chapter Summaries: what’s already on the page. Quarkle writes and updates these for you as you write, one per chapter, and every chapter has one.
• Chapter Notes: your working instructions for that chapter, beats to hit, how a character should be acting or feeling here, a tone or POV override, anything scoped just to this chapter. As you chat about the chapter, Quarkle writes here too, and clears an item once it lands in the prose. You can edit it directly as well. Not every chapter has one; add one with the + next to Chapter Notes and pick a chapter.

Think of the Summary as a record of what’s already on the page, and the Notes as your working instructions for getting it there, whatever’s ephemeral and chapter-scoped rather than durable across the book. Both travel into Chat automatically whenever that chapter is open. The one thing that never touches either is the Atlas’s background upkeep (the process that keeps character and world notes current as you write): it can read a chapter’s notes for context, but only Chat and you ever write to them. See Memory, Book Notes, and Chapter Notes for where to put what.

​

It updates itself

As you write, Quarkle reads what changed and updates the affected notes. It adds new characters, extends summaries, and keeps profiles current. When it is catching up, the sync button spins and tells you so. You can also press it to sync right away, or Download to save the whole Atlas as a .zip.

​

Reading a note

Open any note to read it. Notes Quarkle wrote say so, and each note keeps a history of how it changed.

​

Editing a note

Every note is yours to change. Open it and click the edit (pencil) button. You get a simple editor with bold, italic, headings, and lists. Make your changes and save. Every edit is saved as a version, so you can always see what changed or go back.

​

Freezing a note

To stop Quarkle from changing a note, freeze it. Frozen notes are left exactly as written until you unfreeze them.

​

Version history for every note

Nothing in your Atlas is ever lost. Every note keeps a full history, and every change is recorded: the ones Quarkle makes as you write, and the ones you make by hand.

​

The Activity timeline

The Activity tab is a timeline of every change to your Atlas, newest first, grouped by day. Each row shows the note, its kind, who made the change (you or Quarkle), the word count, and how much was added or removed. You can search it.

​

See exactly what changed

Open any change to see a word-level diff: what was removed is struck through, what was added is highlighted, with a −deleted / +added count at the foot.

​

A single note’s history

Open a note and Quarkle can show just its changes: the same timeline, filtered to that one note.

​

Open, edit, and restore a version

Open a past version to read it in full. It shows as a Version N page with a Versions breadcrumb, so you always know you are looking at history, not the live note. From a version you can:

• Copy its text.
• Edit it. Your edit saves as a new version, so you never overwrite the history behind it.
• Restore it. The note returns to that version, and the restore is itself recorded, so you can always move forward again.

​

Chapter summaries too

Chapter summaries are notes like any other. Edit one by hand and your change is saved as a version you can revert, the same as any character or world note.