October is for the plan. November is for the draft.
StoryVue is a visual story planner, and Preptober is its month: four October weeks to build your cast, their relationships, your places, and a scene list on one timeline, so the November draft opens knowing what is true in chapter one. The planning layer is free forever, with no AI anywhere in it.
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Fifty thousand words need a map.
Preptober is the writing tradition of spending October preparing the novel you draft in November. The organization behind NaNoWriMo wound down in 2025, but the tradition outlived it: writers still start drafting on November 1, in communities old and new, and October is still when they get ready.
The drafts that stall in week two rarely stall for lack of willpower. They stall on questions: who knows the secret by this scene, where everyone is standing, what has already changed. Answer those in October and November becomes writing, not archaeology.
Week 1: the cast, and what stands between them.
Create an entry for every major character, then connect them. A relationship in StoryVue is a sequence of phases, each pinned to the scene where it begins: allies in chapter two can be rivals by chapter nine without a single stale note. The demo below is the real thing, live.
Week 2: places, and the rules of the world.
Give the story somewhere to happen. Locations, factions, items, and the rest of the 22 entity types live on the same connected canvases as your cast, so a place is one click from everyone who has ever stood in it. If the rules matter (magic, law, succession), write them down once as entries your scenes can reference.
Worlds bigger than one book can add maps, family trees, and custom calendars on the World Builder plan; everything this week actually needs is free.
Week 3: scenes, in the order the story happens.
Turn the plan into a scene list and drag it into order on the Master Timeline. This is the spine of the draft: fifty thousand November words go faster when every session starts with the next scene already decided.
Week 4: what is true on page one.
Record what has already happened before your story opens: the debt unpaid, the wound half healed, the secret two people share. Every later scene lists what came before it, in order, as read-only context. It's the story bible that keeps itself, and it is what keeps chapter nine consistent with chapter two in the middle of a sprint.
Then, on November 1: write.
Draft beside the plan in the manuscript editor, with every character one @-mention away (Writer, $5/mo), and every account includes one free trial of the top plan. Planning stays free forever either way, and your work exports whenever you want it.
Start with the sample story, or your own.
The sample project is a finished graph of 84 entities, 41 connections, and a 14-scene Master Timeline, waiting on your Dashboard the moment you sign up. One click to open it, or start from an empty canvas. No credit card, no time limit.