One calm home for the whole book.
Plan the story, write the pages, and keep your characters, world, and research a click away. Helicon holds everything that goes into a long book in one place, then steps back so the page in front of you stays clear.
Works offline · One file you own · No subscription
Writing a book shouldn’t take six apps.
Your outline lives in one app. Your chapters in another. Character notes in a spreadsheet, research in a folder, formatting somewhere else again. Every jump between them drops a thread, and the outline you built slowly stops matching the book you are writing. Helicon keeps your plan, your manuscript, and your world together, so when a scene moves, the rest of the book keeps up with it.
Write with the whole book within reach.
Write on a clean page, with your chapters and scenes listed down one side and nothing else fighting for attention. The synopsis, status, and point of view for the scene you are in stay a glance away, and the rest stays out of sight until you want it. Writing a screenplay instead? Switch the page to script format and keep going.
- Chapters, scenes, status, POV, and synopsis in one view
- Screenplay format alongside prose
- Your session goal and reading time, always in view
See the story before every scene exists.
Lay your plotlines out across chapters or acts, give a character or a subplot its own track, and mark where each thread is introduced, planted, developed, and paid off. Sketch a scene before you have written a word of it, then fold it into the manuscript once it is ready.
- Plotlines and subplots across chapters or acts
- Mark where a thread is introduced, planted, developed, and paid off
- Scene sketches that grow into the draft
Build the beats. Change your mind.
Start from a familiar story structure or build your own beat sheet. Drag beats between acts, rename them, and keep each one tied to the scenes it covers. Your outline stays something you actually use instead of a file you write once and never open again.
- Story templates and fully editable beat sheets
- Drag beats between acts
- Beats stay linked to the manuscript
Give the next paragraph the whole room.
Flow keeps one paragraph lit and lets everything else fade back, with typewriter scrolling, a quiet timer, and a short summary when you stop. Nothing in it blinks or nags at you, and there are no countdowns.
- Typewriter scrolling with one lit paragraph
- A quiet session timer
- A recap when you stop writing
Keep the people and their promises close.
Keep your characters and their relationships in one place, with your settings, lore, research, and notes right beside them. Search the whole project and jump to any scene where a detail showed up, so a name you invented in chapter two is still there in chapter twenty.
- Characters, relationships, and arcs
- Settings, lore, research, and files
- See every scene a character appears in, and jump to it
Notice canon drift before a reader does.
Writing LitRPG or progression fantasy? Define your world's ladders, laws, abilities, and ascensions, and Helicon reviews them in story order, points out possible contradictions, and takes you to the relevant scene. You decide what is a mistake and what is the exception that makes the story interesting.
- Model ladders, laws, abilities, and ascensions
- Findings reviewed in story order
- Every finding links back to its scene
Protect the turning points.
Save a named snapshot before a big revision, then compare what changed scene by scene and bring back an earlier draft without losing the one in front of you. You get the safety of a full history of your drafts, with nothing technical to set up.
- Named snapshots you choose
- Scene-level comparison of changes
- Restore without losing the current draft
Know how the book is moving.
See your word count by session, day, and chapter, along with your writing streak, your pace over the last 30 days, and a projected finish date. The numbers are there when you want them and easy to ignore when you don't.
- Goals, sessions, streaks, and weekly words
- Chapter totals and 30-day pace
- A projected finish date, without streak shame
Each has a plain name and a clear job.
In Greek myth, Mount Helicon was home to the nine Muses. The app is laid out the same way: nine rooms, each named for the part of the work it holds. The character is there when you want it and out of the way when you don’t.
Chapters, scenes, and the page itself.
One lit paragraph and a quiet timer.
Plotlines and plan tracks across the book.
The editable shape of the story.
People, relationships, and arcs.
Snapshots, comparison, and restore.
Lore, research, attachments, and notes.
Goals, pace, and projected finish.
A preview of shared reading, later.
Chorus is an early look at shared reading. For now it stays offline and connects to nothing.
Bring work in. Take work out.
Helicon runs on your Mac, not in the cloud. Each project is a single .helicon file you keep wherever you like, so you can write offline, back it up your own way, and take your work out in a standard format whenever you want.
- Markdown
- DOCX
- Fountain
- Scrivener .scrivx
- Markdown
- DOCX
- ePub 3
- FDX
- 6×9 PDF
Reading and export are always free.
Helicon is free to download and free to use in full for 30 days. When the trial ends, it never locks your book. The app keeps opening, searching, and exporting every project you have, for good. Only new writing waits for the one-time purchase.
Every room and every feature for 30 days. Afterwards, and forever:
- Open, read, and scroll any .helicon project
- Full-project search
- Export DOCX, ePub 3, FDX, PDF, Markdown, and Fountain
A single purchase that never renews or expires. There’s no subscription behind it.
- Unlimited projects, unlocked forever
- Create, write, and edit in every room
- Import from Markdown, DOCX, Fountain, and Scrivener
- Every future local update, included
“Lifetime” means the local app forever. Shared reading and cloud collaboration, when they arrive, will be a separate optional service, never a feature taken away from this one.
Your project is yours.
Helicon is in development for macOS. If you write long books and want to hear when it ships, send us a note. We answer every email ourselves.
macOS · Native Mac app