Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried.
That the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"
A Mac writing environment for novelists.
Series, novels, chapters, scenes. Worldbuilding next to the prose, never on top of it. Local-first. Free during early access.
Most writing apps optimise for managing the project. StoryaWrite optimises for finishing the prose.
The difference matters when you are on draft three of book four, the structure is already in your head, and what you need is a desk. Not a corkboard. Not a database. A desk, with the worldbuilding within reach and the chrome out of the way.
What's in v0.1.0
Six surfaces. Each one earns its place.
01 · Scene editor
Prose, first.
TipTap-based rich-text editor sized for long sessions. Spell-check is local. Grammar is opt-in and tells you exactly what gets sent and where before it sends anything.
02 · Codex
Worldbuilding within reach.
A searchable database for characters, locations, factions, anything you keep track of. Inline tagging from the prose. Bulk import from YAML for writers who already keep notes elsewhere.
03 · Chapter and Novel views
Structure without leaving the writing.
Move scenes between chapters. See the shape of the novel. The hierarchy is series → novel → chapter → scene, which is the shape of a book, not a folder tree.
04 · Dashboard
Numbers without ceremony.
Daily session, word count, novel metadata. The numbers a working novelist actually wants to see, without the streaks, the badges, the small celebrations a fitness app would push at you for finishing a paragraph.
05 · Notes
Where the next chapter starts.
Series-scope scratch space for everything that is not yet a scene. The half-formed line, the question you want to answer in book three, the email to your future self.
06 · Export and import
Your manuscript is portable.
DOCX out for editors and beta readers. Markdown out for everything else. Markdown manuscripts in. The file format on disk is plain SQLite and you can read it.
Local-first, on purpose
The manuscript stays on your machine.
No sync. No cloud.
Your novel lives in a SQLite file in your Documents folder. You can copy it, back it up, version-control it, open it in any SQLite browser. We never see it.
No telemetry.
The app makes no outbound network call without your explicit, named opt-in. Spell-check is local. Grammar is off by default. If you turn it on, you are told what gets sent.
No account.
There is no sign-up, no email gate, no licence server. You download the app, drag it to Applications, and start writing. That is the whole flow.
I am Paolo Danese. I wrote five novels in the Portal Wars Saga, all live in Kindle Unlimited. I built StoryaWrite because every writing tool I tried made one compromise I could not live with — cloud sync I did not ask for, project-management framing for what is fundamentally an act of composition, an interface that has not been re-thought since 2005, or a fitness-tracker register applied to creative work. The one I wanted did not exist as a download. So I built it.
v0.1.0 is rough in places. It is also the tool I am writing book six on right now. If you are a serious novelist and any of this sounds like the shape of what you have been hunting for, take it for a session. Tell me where it breaks.
Optional. One email when the next version ships. No newsletter.
Common questions.
Will my manuscript leak?
No. The app makes no outbound network call without your explicit opt-in. Spell-check is local (the macOS spell-checker). Grammar is off by default; if you turn it on, you are shown which service the text is sent to and you can turn it off again at any time. The novel itself is a SQLite file in your Documents folder — we never have a copy.
First time opening on macOS?
Right-click StoryaWrite.app in your Applications folder, choose Open, then click Open in the dialog that appears. macOS shows a "cannot be verified" warning because the app is not notarized yet — early access only. After that first launch, double-clicking works normally. Notarization is on the list; this note goes away when it lands.
How is this different from Scrivener?
Scrivener is a project-management tool for writers, built around a corkboard metaphor. StoryaWrite is a prose-first editor with the structure built into how it stores the work, not how it asks you to think about it. If you love the corkboard, Scrivener is the right tool. If you have outgrown it, this might be.
What about Ulysses, iA Writer, or Obsidian?
Ulysses and iA Writer are excellent for short-form and essay work. Obsidian is a notes tool people sometimes bend into a writing tool. None of them have a Codex sitting next to the prose, and none of them treat series → novel → chapter → scene as the native shape of the file. That difference is the whole reason this exists.
Does it sync between my Mac and another device?
No. v0.1.0 is single-machine on purpose. If you want a backup, drop the SQLite file in a folder your existing tool already syncs (iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a git repository). Sync as a built-in feature is on the road map for after v1.0; it is not a small problem and I would rather get the writing experience right first.
Is the AI part of v0.1.0?
No. v0.1.0 is the writing environment. AI assistance — drafting suggestions, codex extraction from prose, scene-level structural review — is on the road map but not in this build. I want the editor to be the right shape before I add anything that talks back.
Is it really free?
Yes, during early access. There is no payment flow, no trial timer, no credit card. A paid Pro tier is likely after v1.0 with advanced features; the v0.1.0 build will not stop working when that happens, and anyone who downloads now will get clear notice well before any change.
What if it crashes or I find a bug?
Email me at paolo@storya.app. I read everything. Early-access users are who shape v0.2 — if you tell me what broke and what you were doing when it broke, you are doing the work that turns v0.1.0 into a tool other writers can rely on.
Why Mac only?
Because that is what I write on. A serious Windows or Linux build is real work and I would rather do it well than ship a thin Electron port. If you are on Windows or Linux and want to be told if and when that changes, drop your email above.