News

OPEN COMMUNITY

Radial Timeline Community is now open to writers and publishing professionals, with no Radial Timeline plugin required to join or participate. Everyone is welcome, and everyone can contribute to the feed.

If you tried to join in before and ran into barriers, those should now be resolved. Come share your journey toward publishing your next book, or how your own work supports that process.

Explore the Community →

Watch the new Community walkthrough, “A Home for the Long Work,” and see how to share your own publishing journey.

Watch on YouTube →

EDITORIALIST, REWORKED

Keep your revision moving toward the deadline

Working with an editor means turning a delivery of feedback into a revised manuscript by an agreed date. Structural decisions, scene rewrites, and smaller edits compete for the same writing time. Editorialist has been reworked to make that process faster: less time organizing feedback and navigating panels, more time on the revisions that matter next.

A consistent layout across all three feedback views

Review, Pending edits, and Editorialisms now share a harmonized layout, with the same book header, view selector, and import controls. Simpler layouts and clearer actions make it easier to move between an editor's line notes, your own pending changes, and broader structural guidance. You can switch the kind of work you are doing without relearning where everything lives.

Turn an editor's delivery into a schedule

Revision Plan brings work from all three views together. Group the feedback from an editor's handoff, record the return deadline, and set the time you can realistically give to revision each day.

Auto-schedule turns that workload into a proposed schedule. Choose a developmental, copy-edit, or mixed pass; review the suggested priorities and effort estimates; then generate sessions around your working days, existing commitments, and reserve time. Check the draft before applying it. Work that will not fit stays visible, so you can adjust the scope or timing before the deadline becomes a surprise.

Set priorities, then stay on track

Drag to reorder tasks as your priorities change, or move a session onto a different day. Switch between the queue and daily workload to see what comes next and how the plan fits your deadline. Lock commitments you want to keep, then replan the remaining work as the revision develops.

Open the original feedback directly from a planned task, make your editorial decisions, and return to the schedule. Finishing a session marks that planned session complete; accepting an edit or completing a structural directive remains a separate author decision.

Revision Plan Guide → Editorialist Releases →

RADIAL TIMELINE UPDATES

Keep story time visible while you write

The scene's title bar now keeps its date, time, and weekday in view, drawing the start from the note's When property and combining it with Duration to show when the scene ends. You can check where you are in the story's chronology without opening the frontmatter.

Alongside the prose, timing cues help you account for how much story time passes within the scene. Confirm a phrase such as “three hours later,” assign time to a selected passage, or exclude a cue that should not count. Your confirmed allocations build the elapsed total, helping you compare the time in the prose with the scene's planned duration.

Hover over a time marker to see which passage it accounts for.

Click a cue to adjust its duration, count it as elapsed time since the scene began, or exclude it from the total.

More ways to bring a manuscript into Radial Timeline

Manuscript onboarding supports cloud models alongside the local-model route, with a live cost forecast for paid-model runs. Provider settings make the destination of your manuscript clearer, and Inquiry keeps the model you pinned. Recent fixes also address scene insertion numbering and time-zone shifts in exported scene times.

Radial Timeline Releases →

FROM THE WORKSHOP

Make the structural decision first

Before polishing a scene, check whether your editor is asking you to change what that scene does. Settle the larger decision, rewrite what it affects, then return to the sentence-level work. A revision plan is useful when it helps you avoid finishing a passage you already know you need to rebuild.

PRO IS NOW FREE

The full plugin workflow, without a subscription

Radial Timeline Pro is now free. All features in Radial Timeline and Editorialist are available at no cost to support your author workflow as part of the Obsidian community ecosystem—from planning and manuscript analysis to revision and export.

Optional paid AI providers charge separately for their services.

Obsidian Community →

AI CONSIDERATIONS

Choose the workflow—and the spending—you are comfortable with

Using a cloud AI provider through Radial Timeline requires your own provider account, API access, and API key. API usage is billed separately from a ChatGPT or Claude subscription. Before running an analysis, set a spending cap where your provider supports it, enable usage alerts, and check whether the limit actually stops requests or only sends a notification.

Radial Timeline’s cost forecasts are rough estimates, not quotes or spending limits. Pricing and billing rules can change, and estimates may not reflect the latest rates or your final usage. Check the provider’s current prices and billing dashboard. You remain responsible for the services you connect, the material you share, and any charges you incur.

You can also work directly with your vault through a file-aware AI client such as OpenAI Codex or Claude Code on Mac or Windows. Give it access to the vault folder and use your own prompts to review scenes, organize notes, or prepare Editorialist feedback. Some of the same work can fit into your existing monthly subscription within that plan’s allowances. Sign in through the subscription rather than an API key while still retaining the functionality of the plugin. Then review proposed manuscript changes before applying them via the new Editorialist plugin workflow.

OpenAI ChatGPT • Anthropic Claude

WRITE BACK

Where does revision stall for you?

Importing editor feedback, deciding what comes first, or completing each item efficiently? Share an example of how you use the plugins. It will help shape the future of upcoming walkthrough videos and features.

Email feedback → · Feedback Form →

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Watch a novel grow—from scene 1 to 54

A manuscript filling in, one scene at a time, compressed into a few seconds. The clearest answer I have to the question people ask most: what does this actually look like while you are writing?

Watch on YouTube →

JUST RELEASED

The Radial Timeline website is live

We are live! The launch includes v1 of the Community section, with matching plugin updates that bring robust gated and tiered privacy and sharing options. Explore the new interactive Official Radial Timeline Genres Tree, plus live feeds, project pages, and author pages.

IN THIS ENTRY

What's new

See where a subplot actually lives

Subplot rings can now be laid out two ways, switched with the alignment chip at the left of the mode row. Fill spreads each subplot's scenes evenly across its act. Sequence puts every scene at its true position in the full manuscript, aligned with the outer ring — so you can see where a thread enters, where it goes dormant, and how the threads interleave.

Parts are yours to place

Parts are now explicit markers you set yourself, the same workflow as chapters: right-click a scene and choose Set part, with an optional title. P placards mark the boundaries on the Narrative ring, the PDF template carries part titles and epigraphs, and Act goes back to being purely narrative structure.

Your writing sessions, now counted

Radial Timeline now provides session tracking (including auto-mode) as you draft and edit scenes — a running tally of the writing time you put in, so your authoring momentum is easy to see and keep up. And you can share on the community if you so choose.

Report a bug without leaving your manuscript

The bug icon now opens a small, draggable report window right inside Radial Timeline. Add a quick description and a screenshot, and it carries your version and platform details to GitHub or your email client. It's in both the timeline and the Inquiry view.

FROM THE WORKSHOP

Start in Zero-Draft Mode

Resist the urge to edit while you draft. Zero-Draft Mode captures pending changes in a dialog—storing them in your scene Pending Edits—instead of opening the note, so momentum stays with the story. Switch it on in Settings before your next writing session.

Read the how-to guide →

TAKE THE PRO SURVEY

Shape what comes next

Every release is steered by writers using the tool. The Pro questionnaire asks what you are working on, how you write, and what is getting in your way. The better I understand your manuscript and your process, the better I can build Radial Timeline around it.

Take the survey →

GitHub · YouTube · Obsidian