Three kinds of “when”: what is true, when it happened, when the reader learns it

Most continuity errors in a novel are not mistakes about facts. They are mistakes about when. Iseult is a rebel, but since when? Rowan knows his sister passes messages, but did he know it in chapter one? The reader has been told the Magistrate suspects Rowan, or has she only suspected it in your notes? A story bible with one value per fact cannot answer any of these, because it collapses three different questions into one box.

The usual framing is narrative order vs chronological order: the order the book tells things against the order they happened. That is two of the three. The third is what is true now, in your head, after every revision. Lokee keeps all three apart. Current is what you typed on the card. In your world is when something became true in the chronology of the story's events. For your reader is when your manuscript lets the reader find out.

This guide shows where each one lives in the app and follows one secret through all three, so you can see why keeping them separate is what makes flashbacks, unreliable narrators and slow reveals manageable rather than dangerous. The example is The Ashen Circle, the demo story: Lady Iseult Varnhold publicly serves the crown and secretly funds the rebel Ashen Circle, and the reader discovers it in chapter 2, "A Daughter's Ledger".

One fact, three answers

Suppose Iseult's card has a Text field called Allegiance (the story bible template guide shows how to add one).

• Current: you typed "Ashen Circle". That is the truth of your book as you understand it now. Nothing in Lokee changes it behind your back: not recorded history, not AI extraction, not the timeline.
• In your world: she was a crown loyalist until the winter she began rerouting grain to the Undercroft. In Lokee that winter is a world point, "The first grain winter", and the change to Ashen Circle is recorded there. Her loyalist past is recorded too, as "Crown" at an earlier world point such as "Iseult comes of age".
• For your reader: chapter 1 shows her only as the Duke's dutiful daughter, and the reader learns the truth when she opens the ledger in chapter 2. Those are two story points, one in each chapter, and the reader's version ("Crown", then "Ashen Circle") is recorded at them.

Ask "what is Iseult's allegiance?" and you get three correct answers, depending on which "when" you mean. Viewing "Iseult comes of age" shows Crown. Viewing chapter 1 shows Crown, not because it is true but because it is what the reader has been told. Viewing Current shows Ashen Circle. None of that is a contradiction. It is a reveal.

Record the "before", not only the change

One rule surprises almost everyone. Lokee never invents a past value. If the only thing you recorded is "Ashen Circle at the first grain winter", then viewing any earlier moment shows Ashen Circle with the marker earliest recorded: the first thing you recorded in time, flagged as such. To make the past say Crown, record Crown at an earlier point. The same holds for the reader: at a story point where nothing is recorded, the field shows canon or nothing, depending on a vault setting described below, and is marked not modelled. Two records per secret, the before and the after, are what make the views tell the truth.

Current: the card you type on

Current is the ordinary entity card. When you open Iseult's page with Viewing set to Current (the default), every field is editable and every edit simply replaces the value. That is the right behaviour for fixing a typo or changing your mind about her eye colour; the Revisions page logs such edits so you can see how the vault got where it is.

What Current is not is history. Changing "Crown" to "Ashen Circle" at Current says nothing about when she turned. Overwrite instead of recording and the vault forgets there was ever a before. Recording changes instead of overwriting is about that distinction in detail. Here it is enough to know that Current is yours, and Lokee never edits it on its own.

In your world: world points on the Timeline

The chronology of your world is a list of world points on the Timeline page, in the section called World chronology. Its hint says the whole philosophy in seven words: "Order is what counts. A date is optional."

To add one:

1. Open Timeline from the sidebar.
2. Under World chronology, type a name ("The first grain winter") and press Add point. Your first point also creates a timeline to hold it, named Canon.
3. Use Move earlier and Move later to put it in place among the others. There is no dragging; the arrows are deliberate, because the order is the thing Lokee trusts.
4. Optionally give it a date under Date (optional): No date, Real date (with an optional Time of day), or one of your own calendars, such as the demo's Ashen Calendar with Era, Year and Day.
5. Tick Major point if it is a turning point you want to stand out.

If a date disagrees with the order, Lokee says "This date falls before the point above it. Left as you ordered it." and changes nothing. That restraint matters. A flashback, a misremembered date in a character's diary and a genuine typo all look identical from outside. Only you know which it is.

Fine-grained points are fine. A siege can have "Day 1, dawn" and "Day 1, dusk"; a heist can have a point per room. Create points for the moments where something changes, not for every scene. Points can also come from the other direction: when you place a story event in world time, as planning plot with story events describes, Lokee can create the point for you and labels it with the event's name in every list.

The Timeline offers two views of the same points: Sequence, in your order, with events and periods, and Calendar, laid out by date with one lane per calendar and undated points kept "between their neighbours". The calendar guide covers both, and branching timelines covers the Manage timelines → link for alternate versions of events.

For your reader: story points in the Writer

Reading order lives where the reading happens: in the Writer. Open a chapter, choose Views in the toolbar, then Narrative order. (The item only appears when a chapter is open, because a story point is a position inside one.) The panel's hint reads: "Where the reader meets things, not when they happened."

1. Name the point. The placeholder suggests "e.g. Rowan learns the truth"; for our example, "Iseult opens the ledger".
2. Under Anchored to, leave Whole chapter or choose one of the chapter's headings, so the point sits at a scene break rather than at the chapter's start.
3. Press Add point, and order several points within a chapter with Move earlier and Move later.

If you later rename or delete the heading a point was anchored to, the point does not vanish or jump to a neighbour. It falls back to chapter level and says so, and you pick a new heading. A coarse honest answer is better than a precise wrong one.

Story points are ordered by your manuscript tree: chapter 2's points always come after chapter 1's. Reorder chapters and the reader's timeline reorders with them, while the world chronology stays exactly where it was. That independence is the point. The two orders are supposed to differ.

The Viewing control: picking which “when” you see

At the top of entity pages, the Graph, the Timeline and each Map sits a control labelled Viewing. Its list holds:

• Current,
• a group per timeline, World — Canon for the main one, starting with Beginning and then every world point in order (with the events that begin or end there named beside it),
• a group In the manuscript, listing every story point as "chapter — point".

Pick a world point and every page that shows the control answers for that moment: the card shows Iseult's values as they were then, the Relationships tab shows which relationships were in effect, the Graph draws the connections of that moment, and maps put characters where they stood. Pick a story point and the card shows what the manuscript has told the reader by there.

A few rules keep this predictable:

• The past is for looking. Away from Current, the card is a view of history. A notice says "Current values are unchanged; editing here asks what you mean first." If you edit a field anyway, Lokee asks What does this edit mean? and offers Record a change at that moment or Edit the record that set this value. Neither touches Current.
• It is per session. The choice is kept per vault for the browser session. A reload keeps it; a new session starts at Current. You will not open the vault next week and type into the past by accident.
• It only appears when there is something to choose. A vault with no world points and no story points shows no Viewing control at all. History is optional; a vault that never uses it looks no different.
• The Timeline follows world points only. Choosing a manuscript point there shows a notice that the timeline is world chronology; manuscript points and comparisons apply to entity pages.
• Not everywhere. The Writer and Story Events do not have the control. The Writer's map panel follows the chapter you are writing instead, without changing what the rest of the vault is viewing.

Markers explain values that might otherwise puzzle you: earliest recorded when you are viewing a moment before the first recorded change, no history — current value for a field that has none, and not modelled at a story point where you have not recorded what the reader is told.

Compare: two moments side by side

Press Compare… and the control splits into a left and a right side with "vs" between them. On an entity page the rows that differ are highlighted, which answers "what changed between chapter 1 and chapter 3?" or "what did the grain winter change?" in one glance. On maps, Compare shows arrows for everyone who moved. Stop comparing returns to a single moment; Back to current returns to Current.

What the reader has not been told yet

Story points raise a question: at a story point where you have recorded nothing, what should a field show? Lokee lets you decide per vault in Settings → Writing → When nothing is modelled in narrative knowledge:

• Show the canon value: the reader is assumed to see what is true, until you record otherwise. Good for straightforward books where reveals are the exception.
• Show no value: nothing is shown until you record what the manuscript presents. Good for mysteries, where assuming the reader knows something is exactly the bug you are trying to catch.

Either way the field is marked not modelled, never "unknown", because Lokee cannot know what your prose implies.

On an entity's History tab, the Presented at box gives a quick audit of a single character: choose a point in the manuscript and see, field by field, what the reader has been told by then, from which point, and what canon says next to it.

Narrative order vs chronological order: the errors the split prevents

Collapsing the three "whens" produces specific, familiar mistakes. Keeping them apart prevents each one.

The early leak. You update Iseult's card to "Ashen Circle" while drafting chapter 5, then reread chapter 1 with the card open and let her think like a rebel in a scene where the reader must still trust her. With story points, viewing chapter 1 shows Crown. The card tells you what the reader believes at that moment, which is what you need when revising it.

The time-travelling fact. Rowan carries the Watch's signet in a scene set before he joined the Watch, because his card says he has it. With world points, viewing that earlier moment shows the field as it was then. If all you recorded was the day he received it, the earlier view still shows the signet but marks it earliest recorded, your cue to record what he had before.

The flashback that "fixes" the order. A flashback in chapter 9 shows the grain winter. If one timeline had to serve both reading order and chronology, you would either put the grain winter after chapter 8's events (wrong world) or mark chapter 9 as happening early (wrong book). With two axes, the flashback is just a story point in chapter 9 that presents something from an early world point.

The forgotten reveal. You know the reader learns about the ledger in chapter 2; your co-author does not. With a story point named for it, the reveal is a visible object in the manuscript, not a sentence in your head. The continuity check lists such places under "Readers don't know this yet": information, never a fault.

The silent rewrite. You decide Iseult turned rebel a year later than you first thought. With world points, you delete one recorded change and record it at a different point. Without them, you rewrite a dozen notes and hope you found them all.

Iseult's secret, end to end

Here is the whole thing done once, in the order I would do it, on a vault that has Iseult's card with an Allegiance field and nothing else.

1. Two world points. On the Timeline, add "Iseult comes of age" and then "The first grain winter". The second lands below the first, which is the order you want. No dates needed.
2. Two story points. In the Writer, open chapter 1 and add "Iseult at the Duke's table" under Views → Narrative order, anchored to the whole chapter. Open chapter 2 and add "Iseult opens the ledger", anchored to the heading of the ledger scene.
3. The world's version. On Iseult's card, click Record a change… beside Allegiance. Choose "Iseult comes of age", value "Crown". Record. Do it again: "The first grain winter", value "Ashen Circle".
4. The reader's version. The same link, twice more: at "Chapter 1 — Iseult at the Duke's table", value "Crown"; at "Chapter 2 — Iseult opens the ledger", value "Ashen Circle".
5. Check Current. It still says "Ashen Circle", because recording never touches it. If it said anything else, you would fix it here, at Current.
6. Look. Set Viewing to "Iseult comes of age": Crown. To "The first grain winter": Ashen Circle. To chapter 1: Crown. To chapter 2: Ashen Circle. Press Compare…, put chapter 1 on the left and chapter 2 on the right, and Allegiance is the highlighted row. That highlighted row is the reveal, as an object you can point at.

Four records and four points. Everything after that, the flashback in chapter 9, the moment Rowan works it out, Ophelia's suspicions, is more of the same.

Common mistakes

Recording only the "after". The most frequent one. Every earlier view shows the new value with earliest recorded beside it, and people read that as a bug. It is Lokee refusing to guess. Record the before.

Putting the reader's version on the world axis. The alibi Iseult gives Ophelia in chapter 3 is not a world fact; it is a thing the reader hears. Record it at a story point. The guide on keeping a mystery fair is built around that distinction.

Making a point for every scene. The Viewing list becomes a wall. Make points where something changes. A chapter in which nobody's facts move needs no world point at all.

Trusting a date over the order. When Lokee says the date falls before the point above it, people correct the order to match the date. Sometimes the date is the typo. Decide which one you trust for that point, and remember that the order is what every view runs on.

Using State Timeline notes as history. The State Timeline box on a card is a scratchpad; Viewing does not read it. If you want to see it at a past moment, it has to be a recorded change.

Editing the past by accident. You cannot, which is the good news. The card at a past moment asks What does this edit mean? before anything happens. Read the question; the two answers do different things.

What Lokee doesn't do here

Lokee does not read your prose to work out what the reader knows. Story points and the values presented at them are yours to record (AI review can propose a Reader learns it in chapter when it extracts a change, but you still confirm it). So the reader's axis is only as complete as you make it, and the sensible scope is the three or four secrets the plot turns on, not every fact in the book.

The Writer has no Viewing control. You cannot set the editor to "chapter 1" and have mentions in the text show the reader's version; you check the card instead, with Viewing set to that chapter. And the control is per session, so a long revision pass across several days means setting it again each morning. That is deliberate, and I still forget.

A five-minute setup for an existing draft

You do not need to model your whole book. Start where the stakes are:

1. On the Timeline, add world points for the five to ten moments where things change: a coronation, a betrayal, a death, a move.
2. In the Writer, add a story point in each chapter that contains a reveal, anchored to the scene's heading.
3. On the two or three characters whose secrets drive the plot, use Record a change… beside the field that changes: the old value at an early world point and the new value at the point where it changes, then the same at the story points where the reader is told each version.
4. Set Viewing to chapter 1 and read those cards. Anything that surprises you is either a reveal you forgot or a leak you have not written yet.

If you are still drafting and the world is growing as you write, worldbuilding while you write shows how to add points and records as scenes raise them rather than in one sitting.

The help's Time section and its worked example show the same model with a different cast; Entities over time lists every marker. The demo vault at /demo has Iseult and the rest of the cast on cards but no points or records yet, so it is a safe place to try the four points and four records above before touching your own book. Then continue with recording changes instead of overwriting.