NovlHeim
Where your stories grow.
The last writing software you will ever need.
NovlHeim is a local-first writing workspace for novelists building long stories and the worlds behind them. Manuscript, characters, places, timelines and arcs live in one place, and nothing you write leaves your machine unless you send it.
The question
You outline first.
NovlHeim has the planning rooms for that: a timeline with your world's own calendars, an arcs board that follows each character from promise to payoff, and a codex for every person and place. All of it is wired to the manuscript, so when the plan changes the chapters know.
You write first and find the shape on the way.
So the writing room comes first: a focus editor with four passes, Compose, Redraft, Revise and Polish, and a chapter list you reorder by dragging. As you add chapters and scenes the structure fills in behind you. The timeline and codex are there when you want them, not before.
Most writers plan a little, write a lot, and change the plan.
In NovlHeim the plan and the prose are one project. Move a scene and the timeline moves. Rename a character in the codex and every chapter follows.
Either way, you write, and then you write again. Redrafting is built in, not bolted on.
One app
Begin with a scene, a character, a map or a timeline. The other rooms are already there when you need them. When you need a new tool you do not need a new app, and your manuscript and your notes come with you the whole way.
A focus editor that shows only the chapter you are in, and keeps every draft you write.
Every version is kept, so nothing you cut is lost.
A timeline with ages and calendars of your own making, and an arcs board with beats for every character.
Change a date once and every scene that depends on it knows.
A codex for every person, place and thing, with aliases, tags and kin, and maps you draw yourself with pins, regions, labels and layers.
Bring what you have. NovlHeim imports docx, epub, odt, rtf, markdown, html and pdf, and whole folders, as manuscript, notes or codex entries.
Export leaves in the same formats.
The six tools
Write without leaving your world.
Four passes: Compose, Redraft, Revise and Polish. The chapter list beside you (parts, chapters, scenes, drag to reorder), only the chapter you are in on the page, and Cuts, where every line you take out is kept.
Two drafts, side by side.
Two drafts open at once: the one you are working from on the left, the new one on the right. You rewrite a scene rather than edit it, and both are kept.
Your story at a glance.
Every chapter and the one still open, the writing goal and where the draft stands against it, and sessions and word counts read as bars.
See every thread. Shape every turn.
Ages and calendars of your world's own making, events placed in time, and ranges that can be a war or an afternoon.
Follow each arc from promise to payoff.
Each character's thread, its rise and fall act by act, beat by beat, summarised as throughline, wound, need and change.
Every place, remembered.
Maps you draw yourself, with pins that open a place's page, and a wiki entry behind every pin: lore, geography, who lives there, aliases, tags, kin, and every scene it appears in.
The first version of NovlHeim does not generate your prose and does not require AI to function. Nothing in Core writes a sentence for you, and nothing in Core needs a model to run.
Your writing environment is built around work stored on your computer rather than requiring a permanent cloud connection. Offline is the normal state, not a fallback.
Import, export, backup and recovery are core parts of the product—not afterthoughts. Your manuscript leaves in your formats whenever you want it to.
You may encounter bugs, unfinished edges or things that simply don't make sense yet.
The idea
The old stories imagined worlds connected by Yggdrasil: places, histories and lives branching outward from a common source.
A novel grows much the same way.
A blank page begins as almost nothing.
Then a person appears.
A city.
A history.
A war.
A relationship.
A world.
NovlHeim is a place for those branches to grow together.
What grows from the blank page is yours.
Imports docx, epub, odt, rtf, markdown, html, pdf and whole folders. Exports leave in the same formats.
Next
We are looking for writers with a real story who will tell us what is wrong.