The words MechaSquid's screens and this guide use, each in a sentence or two, with the page that tells you more.
Your book and its world
Book: what you write and what your readers get: its chapters and their scenes, with a title, plans and goals. Most authors have one book. See Start your first book.
World: the setting your books share: the wiki, the Atlas, the Timeline and your ideas. You see the word on those parts (the World half of the menu, "world pages") and when several books, such as a series or a prequel, share one setting. With one book, the book and its world go together. See Several books in one world.
Page: one entry in the wiki, about a character, a place or anything else your book stands on. Scenes, chapters and ideas have pages of their own too, but the wiki lists only the world's. See Make a page.
Kinds of page: character; place; group (a family, an army, a guild); thing (an object that matters); event (something that happens in the world rather than in a scene); lore (the background that holds the world together: history, magic, customs); and plot thread (a line of the story you follow through the book). See The wiki is your world.
Relationship: how two pages relate, in a few words: someone knows someone, a place is in a region, a character is a member of a group. A relationship can hold for only part of the story. See Relationships.
Link: a name in your text that leads to its page. Links are how MechaSquid knows who and what is in a scene, and names of pages become links by themselves a few minutes after you save. See Link words to wiki pages. A web link leads from words to a page on the internet instead, and has a small ↗; readers of a shared copy see only its words. See Link words to a web page.
Planning and writing
Chapter: a part of the book that holds scenes. A chapter has a title and a plan but no text of its own: its text is its scenes'. See Scenes and chapters.
Scene: one place, one continuous stretch of time and one set of characters. In Write mode, a line with *** or End scene starts the next one. See Scenes and chapters.
Planned scene: a scene with a plan and no text yet, drawn hollow on the Outline and in Contents. Plotting is adding planned scenes and saying what should happen in them. See Add planned scenes.
Plan: a note to yourself on a book, a chapter or a scene: what should happen, and what it is for. Plans are never exported and never shown to readers. See Plan the book, its chapters and its scenes.
Round: one pass over the whole book: the first draft, a revision, a pass after beta readers. Starting the next round asks for every scene to be accepted again, and changes nothing in the text. See Rounds and accepting scenes.
Accepted: a scene you have marked done for this round. If you change it afterwards, it shows as "changed since accepted". See Rounds and accepting scenes.
Mood: five faces, from angry to happy, for how you feel about a scene. It is a feeling, never a decision: a face does not accept a scene. See How you feel about a scene.
Label: your own word on a page, a scene, a chapter or an idea, such as "needs research" or "cut?", so you can find them together. MechaSquid never sets one. See Labels.
Idea: a thought caught before it goes, kept as a page of its own until you use it in a scene, a plan or a page, or decide not to. See Ideas.
Checking and tidying
Comment: a note on words you selected, from you, your AI assistant or a reader, shown beside the text in the colour chosen for it. A comment is a note, not a task. See Comment on your text.
Flag: something that may not hold together, such as a link to a page that does not exist or a character in two places at once, with what to do about it. The health check, under the flags, looks at how your pages and scenes fit together as they are now. See Flags and the health check.
Tidy (new scenes to tidy): after you write, new and changed scenes wait to be tidied: a title, links to the pages they name, a summary, a consistency check, a copyedit you accept or reject, and a scene that holds more than one place, stretch of time or set of characters divided into scenes. Your own assistant or Tidy new scenes does it, and nothing in your prose changes without you. See Tidy new scenes.
Readers and history
Shared copy: a private copy of the book, or of chosen chapters, that readers read and comment on. It changes only when you choose to update it, so readers never see a half-written sentence. See Share your book privately.
Reader: someone you shared a copy with, by a link or by a personal invitation. Readers comment, answer your questions and suggest changes, which reach you on the Comments and Revisions pages. See What your readers see and do.
Revision and history: every saved change to a text is kept as a revision. A page's History lists them, compares any of them with the text now and puts one back. A proposed change, from your assistant or a reader, waits under Revisions for you to accept or reject. See History and putting text back and Review a proposed change.
Trash: where deleted pages, scenes and chapters wait for 30 days before they are erased. Restore puts each one back as it was. See The trash.
Your AI assistant
Your AI assistant: the AI app you already use (Claude, ChatGPT or another), connected to MechaSquid so it can read your book and work in it while you talk to it. MechaSquid's screens also call it an agent. The connector is the address you add to the app so it can reach MechaSquid. See Connect your AI app.
Agent levels (what your assistant may change): three levels, set in the book's Settings separately for the manuscript and for world pages: On the website only (it proposes, and you decide in MechaSquid), In conversation (it accepts or rejects when you tell it to) and Directly (what it writes applies at once). Every change is kept under its name and can be undone. See Decide what your assistant may change.