Reunion Literary Editor

Bringing order to chaos, one document at a time.

About

Reunion Literary Editor (RLE) is a software package written for someone who, upon starting to write a book, finds themselves going off on a tangent about some random character’s backstory and then going off on more tangents beyond that. Traditional writing tools allow you to plan out and organize your plots, worlds, and characters. RLE allows you to do it in whatever chaotic way suits your fancy.

Want to arrange a dozen different planning documents on your screen all at once? You can do that with RLE. Don’t try sticking pins into your monitors though. They weren’t designed for that. Masking tape could work though. For legal reasons, that was a joke.

RLE is designed to preserve your work. Any text you delete can be recovered. Delete a chapter out of a story? You can get it back. All of your work is autosaved every minute. Why does it do this? Because I don’t want anyone to get the idea that anything they deleted will stay deleted forever. I can’t guarantee that. Someone can download a tool like this SQLite toolkit and run it on your story database to find every embarrassing thing you wrote about them and tried to delete later. Rather than giving you an illusion of safety, I have fully embraced the idea that everything is permanent and incorporated that mindset into RLE. It’s like how everything on the internet is permanent. Don’t jot down anything you don’t want being found later.

The Main Page

A collection of stories typically fits into a series. Each book gets divided into chapters, which can have multiple scenes in them. Put all of your scenes into a single chapter or split everything up into discrete chunks. It’s up to you. Create an entire outline for your book and fill it out, or trash everything and start from scratch. Is something out of order? Drag it to the place it should be. Does that scene you wrote for your fantasy series actually make more sense in the sci-fi one? You can move it from one place to the other effortlessly.

What do all the colors and symbols mean? They mean whatever you want them to mean. RLE is built to support whatever organizational system you come up with.

Planning Documents

Have some ideas for a specific part of your book? Don’t jot it down on a random piece of paper, or try to shoehorn the notes into your text somehow. Put your notes right next to your content! Add as many planning documents to your story universe as you need. You can attach them to scenes, chapters, books, or a whole series.

The Text Editor

It’s not Microsoft Word, that’s for sure. However, it offers all of the features that you need to actually write a story. You can type text and format it if that’s what you feel like doing. There’s a spell checker. Really, what else could you ask for?

RLE auto saves all of your documents once every minute. Never worry about having to compulsively hit Ctrl-S again!

Write Your Story

Done planning? Good. You can now keep all your planning documents on your screen for reference as you get to work on the hardest part of the story writing process: the actual story writing. If you need motivation, you can see how many words you typed out in this session and how many pages that ends up being. Ultimately, it’s up to you to actually do the writing. Any requests to integrate so-called “AI” systems into RLE will be summarily rejected.

Total Document History

Did you have a good idea for a part of your story, but you deleted it in an earlier draft? RLE stores every version of every document you ever wrote. You can even tag each version for future reference. Look at each version to see what changed, how much was added, and how much was deleted. It took me over three years to go from the first draft of this scene to the final version and thanks to the power of RLE I know exactly how I got from the beginning to the end.

Transcript Export

Have you finished your transcript and you’re ready to submit it? Generate a transcript for your full book and paste it into a text editor of your choice to tweak it for submission to the Journal of Universal Rejection, or any other reputable publisher.

People, Places, Things, Events, and Ideas

If you feel like it, you can use RLE to organize every aspect of your story. People, places, things, events, factions, and concepts to be specific. Write as many planning documents as you need for these things. Or, don’t use this set of tools at all. Everything is up to you.

Scratchpads: The catch-all solution for brainstorming

If you looked at the self-enforced structure of the previous section and found it revolting then the Scratchpad tab is for you! Create a list of topics and write documents for them. Do whatever you want.

Search Feature

Admittedly, I haven’t polished this bit as much. However, if you’re looking for something and you can’t quite remember where it was you can use the search page to find it.

Statistics

Do you enjoy watching numbers go up? Or, down if you’re a really good editor? You can look at a summary of everything you’ve written including how many words that is, how many pages that is, and how long it would take the average person to read every last scrap of text you’ve ever written. I wouldn’t recommend spending over 7 hours reading all of my ramblings though.

Accessing Deleted (Or Old) Content:

As I said before, everything you’ve ever written gets saved forever even if you’ve deleted it. That’s great if you want to recover that great idea you rejected on a bad day. It’s terrible if you’ve used RLE to plan out a criminal act and want to cover it up (please don’t commit crimes or use RLE to commit a crime).

The historical library viewer lets you look at every document you’ve ever created, including the deleted ones, and also every version of that document. If that magical piece of literature you deleted is buried in an old version of a deleted document you will be able to track it down eventually.