Show HN: Novel Goggles Integrated story planning and writing for better stories

Hi HN. My name is Lionel and I’ve bootstrapped a project called Novel Goggles. It’s a web app that helps writers with their story crafting by integrating story structuring, outlining, world building, character progression, story arc visualisation and manuscript writing.

I started working on it in mid-2020 while learning JS. It’s my first web project (although I’ve got lots of other software development experience) and first time working on a UI directly, which has been interesting. It’s written from scratch in JS on the client side and using nodeJS on the server side. I decided to avoid React/Angular or similar since the initial scope was quite limited.

Scope creep has since ballooned the feature set but I find that I quite enjoy working on the code propping up the UI, event handling, syncing with the server, etc. so I don’t plan on adopting a front-end framework any time soon.

Features:

- Story structure and outlining.

- Character development.

- World building.

- Create and visualise story arcs.

- Your scene outlining and world-building information can pop up while you write and character information is available in the context menu.

It’s in beta at the moment and I’d love some feedback if anyone is interested in trying it out.

Unfortunately, it requires sign-up to try the app since I didn’t foresee a scenario where I would need to decouple the front-end app from server-side authentication.