Penseed

Never lose a plot thread — and never spoil your own mystery.

Penseed is a consistency companion for novelists. It reads each chapter as you write it, remembers every planted thread, character detail, and world rule, and quietly warns you before a contradiction slips past. It also tracks what your reader knows at every point in the story — separate from what each character knows — so you never give away a twist too early.

The problem with long novels

Most writing tools get worse the longer your book becomes. They work by re-reading your entire manuscript from page one every time you ask for help — so at chapter 50 they feel slow, at chapter 200 they feel expensive, and at chapter 500 they start forgetting what happened in chapter 3.

Penseed works the opposite way. It remembers as you write, like a tireless editor who has read every chapter and never forgets a single detail. Analyzing chapter 500 never means re-reading chapters 1 through 499.

Why Penseed stays fast

Say you rewrite chapter 205 of a 500-chapter novel. Most tools respond by re-reading all 295 chapters that come after it — every single one — to catch up. That's slow and expensive, and you pay for all of it.

Penseed doesn't. It already knows your story, so it can tell which of those later chapters your change actually affects — usually just a handful — and it re-checks only those, one after another in order. You pay for a few chapters, not hundreds.

That's the whole idea behind Penseed: read each chapter once, remember every thread, character, and rule it introduces, and never make you re-read the book from the start. It stays fast and cheap no matter how long your novel gets — and it never needs to keep your original text to do it.

What Penseed tracks for you

• Foreshadowing — the one thing almost no other tool does. Penseed remembers every thread you plant, tells you which ones are still dangling, and which ones you've already paid off.
• Your cast and world — characters, places, items: their names, aliases, and how they change chapter by chapter.
• Contradictions — if an eye color, a kingdom's history, or a magic rule quietly changes, Penseed flags it before your readers do.
• World rules — so names, places, and mechanics stay locked in place across your entire series.
• Reader knowledge — what the reader knows, and when they learned it, kept separate from what each character knows (see below).
• Edits that ripple — rewrite chapter 100 when you're already at chapter 200, and Penseed tells you exactly which later chapters are affected, instead of making you re-check everything.

Never spoil your own mystery

You know the killer is the butler. Your readers shouldn't — not until chapter forty. Penseed is the only consistency engine that tracks what your reader knows separately from what each character knows.

As you analyze each chapter, Penseed records what the reader has learned so far, and which characters know it too. Rewind the reader-knowledge timeline to any chapter and see exactly what a reader knows at that point — so you can:

• catch a character casually mentioning a secret the reader hasn't discovered yet,
• plant dramatic irony on purpose, where the reader knows more than a character,
• keep track of what the reader thinks they know — including things they've only suspected, or misunderstood.

How to use it

Run Penseed: Analyze Current Note from the command palette. Penseed will bind the note to a project, analyze it, and show how many new threads and characters it found.

Click the layout-grid icon in the left ribbon — or run Penseed: Open Foreshadowing Board — to open a four-column board (Pending / In Progress / Resolved / Cancelled). Drag a clue between columns to update its status, kept in sync with the web app. For the full board with relations and editing, open the web app.

Double-click any card on the board to jump straight to the matching chapter note — Penseed opens it, scrolls to the exact sentence the card refers to, and highlights it for you, so you don't have to hunt through the chapter yourself.

Click the external-link icon on any card to open that foreshadowing's full detail view in the Penseed web app — Penseed jumps straight to the right project and opens the detail drawer, no hunting required.

Analyze in order — from chapter one

Penseed remembers your story the way a careful editor does: by reading it in order, from the first chapter onward. Each chapter's analysis builds on every chapter before it. Chapter 50 is analyzed knowing what happened in chapters 1–49.

So when you first bring a novel into Penseed, analyze your notes one chapter at a time, starting from chapter one and moving forward in order. Don't skip ahead — if you analyze chapter 10 before chapters 1–9, Penseed can't see the clues those earlier chapters planted.

Why order matters. Foreshadowing is a chain: a hint you plant in chapter 3 pays off in chapter 20. If chapter 20 is analyzed before chapter 3, Penseed can't connect that payoff back to its hint, and the threads, characters, and world rules it records come out wrong. Because every later chapter then builds on that wrong note, a single out-of-order chapter can quietly throw off everything after it — the butterfly effect.

Bringing in a whole book at once

If you're adding a novel you've already written — dozens or hundreds of chapters — you don't have to work through it one note at a time. Use the batch-analyze feature and Penseed will go through every chapter automatically, from the first to the last, in the right order. You don't have to keep track of where you are, or worry about skipping a chapter — the tool handles the order for you.

Already brought the book in and revising later? Open the web app and use Sync Changes — paste your whole manuscript again and Penseed re-analyzes only the chapters that actually changed, skipping the rest at zero cost.

When you edit an earlier chapter

If you rewrite chapter 100 while you're already at chapter 200, Penseed will tell you which later chapters are now out of date. Don't re-analyze just one or two of them — that breaks the chain the same way. Use the single "Batch re-analyze outdated chapters" button instead. It re-analyzes every affected chapter, one by one, in the right order, so the chain stays intact.

Privacy

When you choose to analyze a note, the plugin sends that note's content to Penseed for analysis only. By default Penseed uses the text to build its notes about your story and does not store the original text itself.

You can optionally turn on Save chapter text in Penseed (off by default). When it's on, Penseed keeps an encrypted copy of each chapter's text so it can re-check later chapters after you rewrite an earlier one — no re-pasting needed. Turn the option off and all saved copies are deleted.

The plugin does not read or upload any other files, does not watch your vault, and does not collect telemetry.

Privacy policy: https://penseed.app/privacy

Setup

1. Install the plugin.
2. In Settings → Penseed, click Connect Penseed.
3. Your browser opens — sign in to Penseed with your Google account and click Authorize.
4. Switch back to Obsidian. You're connected. There's no token to copy, and your session renews automatically, so you won't be signed out.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.