This page takes you from a new account to your first book: how to start one, what the dashboard and the book's Overview show, how to find your way around the menu, and where help is on every page.
Create your account
Choose Start your book on the home page, or go to the sign-up page. You can sign up with your Google account (Continue with Google) or with an email address and a password (Create account).
While MechaSquid is in early access, a new account needs an invitation code: six letters and digits. If someone sent you an invitation link, the code is filled in for you. If you already have an account, choose Sign in instead and the code's days are added to it.
When you sign up with a password, MechaSquid sends you an email to confirm the address. You can send it again later from your Account page, under Email. If you sign in with Google, your Google account guards your MechaSquid sign-in too: the Email section links to Google's 2-Step Verification, which asks for a second step (your phone, a passkey or an authenticator app) when someone signs in to your Google account.
Someone who was only invited to read a book needs no code at all: they read and comment on what was shared with them.
Start your first book
A new account opens on the dashboard with the question "Where would you like to start?" and four choices:
- Start writing asks for a title and makes a book with a first chapter and an opening scene, then opens it in Write mode, ready for your first sentence. The title can change later.
- Start with a map makes the same book and opens the Atlas, where you build the world first: land, rivers, climate, countries and towns. Maps and travel explains it.
- Import a book brings in a draft you have already written: a Word file, an EPUB, Markdown, plain text or a Scrivener project. It is read in your browser, split into chapters and scenes, and nothing is saved until you choose to import it. You check the chapters, then sort the names it found into characters, places and the rest, or leave them out.
- Look around first opens the sample book, a finished novel as it looks in MechaSquid. You can open every part of it and change nothing, which makes it a good place to try things before your own book holds much.
The dashboard
The dashboard lists your books. Each one says when you last opened it here; click it to open it.
Under the list, type a title and choose + Book for a new book that opens in Write mode, or + With a map for one that opens in the Atlas. Import a book is beside them. When you have reached the number of books your account may hold, the dashboard says so; a draft can still go into one of your existing books' worlds as another book.
At the top are Account (your name, pen names, email, connected apps, exports and deleting the account), Shared with me when another author has invited you to read something, Help, Feedback, the theme and Sign out. Under the books, "Connected AI apps" says which assistants you have connected.
The book's Overview
Opening a book lands on its Overview: the book at a glance, kept quiet on purpose. A part with nothing to say is not drawn, so a new book's Overview is short.
- Continue writing opens Write mode exactly where you left off. Before you have written anything it says Start writing.
- Share lets someone read the book or chosen chapters. Your readers explains sharing.
- The book's words and scenes, written and planned, and the next planned scene with its plan.
- Since you were last here appears after a while away. It lists what arrived meanwhile: comments from readers and from your AI assistant, changes your assistant made, proposed changes, flags and ideas, each a link to where it is. Now and then it also brings back an idea you have not looked at for a month.
- Needs you lists what is waiting for a decision: scenes to tidy, proposed changes, open comments from readers and assistants (your own comments are notes, not work), flags, scenes in no chapter yet, and scenes with neither text nor a plan. Each line leads to the page that deals with it.
- Where the book is and Goal are the round of work you are in and your deadline and milestones. Planning explains both.
- Chapters, with one mark per scene: filled when it has text, hollow when it is only planned, green when you have accepted it in this round.
Find your way around the menu
The menu on the left has two parts. Book holds what belongs to the open book: Overview, Write, Manuscript, and later Revisions, Comments and Voice. World holds what every book in the same world shares: the Atlas, the Wiki, and later the Graph, the Timeline, Ideas, Labels, Flags and Styles. Most authors have one book and can ignore the difference; The story bible explains it.
The menu shows what your book uses. Overview, Write, Manuscript, the Atlas and the Wiki are always there. The others join once they hold something (the Graph, for example, once there are two wiki pages), and once a part has held something it stays. Everything else waits under More, with a count. Click More to see those parts and Fewer to fold them away again.
Your choice wins over what MechaSquid decides. Point at an item in the menu and choose ↓ More to move it under More; point at one under More and choose ↑ Keep to keep it in the menu. Overview and Write always stay. The choice is remembered on this browser, for all your books.
To give the page more room, fold the menu into a strip of icons with the button beside the logo. Names become tooltips, counts become small badges and the book's switcher becomes its first letter. The button at the top of the strip opens the menu again.
At the bottom of the open menu are the theme, Settings (this world's title, language, what assistants may do, travel, export), Account, Help, Feedback and Sign out.
Go anywhere with Go to
Go to finds any scene, chapter, wiki page or idea in the world by its name, and any part of MechaSquid: Settings, Publish, Export, the Trash, your Account. Press ⌘P on a Mac, Ctrl+P on Windows and Linux, or choose Go to… at the top of the menu.
With nothing typed, it lists the pages you opened recently. Type part of a name, use the arrow keys, and press Enter to open it. On a scene, ⌘↩ on a Mac (Ctrl+Enter on Windows and Linux) opens it in Write mode at that scene instead of its page.
Go to also does a few things: switch between light and dark, capture an idea, start a writing sprint, find words everywhere, and show every shortcut.
Help on every page, and every shortcut
Every page has its own Help: what the page is for, how to do the main things on it, and its keys. Choose Help at the bottom of the menu, or press ? anywhere you are not typing.
To see every shortcut at once, press ⌘/ on a Mac, Ctrl+/ on Windows and Linux. The sheet lists the keys that work anywhere in a book, the keys in the text, and each page's own.
A few keys work everywhere in a book:
- ⌘P (Ctrl+P): Go to.
- ⇧⌘F on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift+F on Windows and Linux: find words in every scene, page and idea, and replace them.
- ⌥⌘N on a Mac, Ctrl+Alt+N on Windows and Linux: capture an idea.
- Esc closes whatever is on top.
Single keys, such as A on a selected card, work only when you are not typing. Shortcuts keep working even when you hide a button from the toolbar on your Account page.
Light and dark
MechaSquid follows your device's light or dark setting the first time. To change it, choose Dark mode or Light mode at the bottom of the menu (or the icon in the folded strip, or on the dashboard). The choice is remembered on this browser.
On a phone or a tablet
MechaSquid works in the browser of a phone or a tablet; there is nothing to install.
- On a narrow screen, including an upright iPad, the menu starts folded into icons until you open it. The magnifying glass in the strip is Go to…, for screens with no keyboard, and it also reaches "Capture an idea".
- Write mode's header wraps onto two lines; on a small screen it leaves out the scene's word count and its "when". On a touch screen it has Go to and capture buttons of its own, and Contents opens over the text from the top left.
- In the Wiki, the list and the open page take turns: a link at the top of the page goes back to the list.
- To select several things where a computer would use ⌘-click or Ctrl-click, choose Select first, then tap them.
- Maps zoom with two fingers.
Connect your AI assistant
MechaSquid works with the AI assistant you already use, such as Claude or ChatGPT: you add MechaSquid as a connector, and then the assistant can read your book, plan with you, describe pages and propose changes you accept or reject. Your assistant shows how to connect it, step by step for each app, and what to ask.