Designed for novel writers and editors, Continuity is not designed to help you as you write a particular draft of a novel.
Instead, Continuity is there for you when you're editing the draft.
Use Continuity as you go through the manuscript, and the app allows you to keep track of what the reader knows about the story. For example, as the author, you know your heroine has blonde hair, blue eyes, and a scar on her leg from an old school injury that's going to be important in the story later - but what does the reader know?
Continuity allows you to log details about characters, outfits, plotlines, locations, and props so that you can assess whether the manuscript has given the reader the right information at the right time, to make sense of the story. You can also keep track of costume changes for the characters - was your villain wearing a cashmere scarf in chapter 3, but suddenly not in chapter 4?
The app also includes sections to help you look at how the manuscript is working in terms of structure, conflict, pacing, grammar, setting, point-of-view, dialogue, protagonist, antagonist, and timeline.
Continuity provides some functionality for editors as well: a style section to keep track of things like the number format to use, and what dictionary has been used, and also an A-Z style sheet of terms used in the manuscript. There is also a facts section, to log details of anything that needs to be verified.
Continuity also allows you to import certain data from Subplot, Character Folio, and Plotline.
Note that the app doesn't hold full character and plotline information (scenes are not imported) when you import them: the whole point of the app is to see what the manuscript is telling you - not what you think it's telling you. It works as a more holistic approach to looking at the story - so rather than importing scenes from Plotline, it just imports the plotlines themselves - and then as the editor, you can check what happens, and where, and know what the story is telling the reader, rather than what your notes planned for the story to tell the reader.
I wrote Continuity to help me in the editing of my own novel manuscripts, so hopefully you'll find it useful for this crucial part of the writing process too.
Happy writing (and editing!)
