Chapter Summaries

Chapter summaries are crucial for maintaining continuity in your book and providing proper context to the AI:

1. After writing a chapter, click "More" in the top-right corner
2. Select the summary option from the dropdown menu
3. Write a detailed summary or use the AI to generate one by clicking "Generate Summary"
4. Save your summary to update the book context

Why this matters: When you request an AI continuation, Prosie includes your chapter summaries as part of the "Story So Far" context up until the chapter you're writing. Without updated summaries, the AI has a weaker picture of previous events, characters, and plot developments, which can lead to continuity errors.

What if I forget to summarise? Prosie won't leave the AI blind. If an earlier chapter has no summary, it falls back to sending the last few hundred words of that chapter's actual prose instead — so continuity isn't lost, you just spend more tokens than a tight summary would. When that happens, the Continue panel quietly tells you how many earlier chapters are running on this fallback, so you can summarise them whenever you're ready.

The Outline view (plan ahead or look back)

Every book has an Outline page — reach it from the Outline button on any book in your library, or the Outline link on the all-chapters page. It lists your chapters as reorderable cards, each showing that chapter's summary.

It works two ways depending on your workflow, and it's genuinely both:

• As a review tool — see every chapter summary in one place to check the shape and continuity of what you've already written.
• As an outlining tool — plan before you write. Add a chapter, write a summary of what should happen, and drag the cards to sketch and reshuffle your book's structure. The prose can come later; the summaries you write here become the planning skeleton you fill in.

When summaries get long, collapse them to a two-line preview (per card, or Collapse all) so dragging chapters into order stays easy, and copy any summary to your clipboard with its copy button.

The Codex (mention-aware context)

On the Edit Book page the Codex panel is the main place to describe your world. Instead of one big freeform box that gets sent in full on every request, you break your world into discrete, named entries (one per character or piece of lore), each with optional aliases and nicknames.

When you generate or rewrite, Prosie injects only the codex entries actually mentioned in the text it's working on — matched by name or alias. That cuts token cost and keeps the AI focused on what's on the page, rather than confusing it with your whole world bible.

The original freeform Lore and Characters boxes are still there, tucked under an Advanced disclosure below the Codex. They're optional and you can ignore them. The rule is per category: once you add any Codex entry of a kind (Lore or Characters), its freeform box is no longer sent — only the matched entries are. A category with no Codex entries falls back to its freeform box, so existing books keep working exactly as before until you opt in. Nothing you've already written is ever migrated or thrown away.

By default, the matcher also looks at your "Story So Far" when deciding which entries are relevant (toggleable in the panel). A known limitation: late in a long novel the Story So Far tends to mention nearly everyone, so this filtering naturally relaxes back toward including everything. If you want the tightest possible context deep into a manuscript, turn that toggle off so only the current passage drives the matching.

Series & shared worlds (for multi-book writers)

Writing more than one book in the same world? Create a Series from the Series link in the top navigation. A series owns a shared Codex: characters and lore you define once on the series page are available to every book in it — no more copy-pasting your world bible between books. Add books to a series from the series page, or pick a series from the Series dropdown on a book's Edit Book page.

When you write in a member book, the shared entries are matched and injected exactly like the book's own Codex — only the ones mentioned in the text are sent. Each book can also add a per-book note to any shared entry (in that book's Codex panel, under "Shared from series"): the note is appended to the shared entry, so it's perfect for showing how a character has grown by this point in the saga.

A deliberate limitation: per-book notes are append-only — a book adds to a shared entry, it can't overwrite or contradict it. The shared "base" text is always sent alongside your note. This handles a character growing over a series beautifully, but it can't cleanly represent a retcon or a reveal that makes the base text wrong: the stale fact stays in context. For a true retcon, edit the shared entry itself on the series page.

Additional Features

The "More" menu provides some extra tools:

• Track your progress with an automatic word counter
• Remove the chapter from your book (warning: this is permanent and I can't recover deleted chapters for you)
• Export the current chapter or the entire book in a Markdown file