# Calamus: your personal writer's room

> Start with a spark. Share a finished story.

Calamus is your personal writer's room for Mac and Android. Reed, your virtual writer's room, interviews you, keeps the Story Board and helps you bring every scene to life. Free for one story with your own AI key. Coming soon.

You don't need a blank document or a degree in creative writing. Bring the idea you've been carrying in your head, and let Reed, your virtual writer's room, help you talk it through and bring every scene to life.

- Status: the apps for Mac (Apple silicon) and Android 8 or later are coming soon. The whole studio will run on the device.
- Account: none. Pro uses a license key, with no email or password.
- Stories: plain Markdown files on your device.

## What Calamus does today

1. Breaks the story with you in a nine-step interview before a word of prose.
2. Keeps each fact on one Story Board page, in plain files on your device.
3. Holds each secret back from a scene until the timeline event that reveals it.
4. Writes in the one style you picked, from first scene to last.
5. Checks its Story Board changes for contradictions, and saves every change in your story's history.

## The writer's room interview

Every new story starts with nine steps. Reed asks, you decide, and each answer becomes a page on your Story Board. Only you move to the next step.

1. **The idea**: Your title, a one-line logline and the genre.
2. **How it sounds**: You pick one of nine styles. It never changes.
3. **When**: The era and the story’s present day.
4. **Where**: The places your story lives.
5. **The people**: Who tells it, and who they meet.
6. **Things that matter**: Objects and lore. The one step you can skip.
7. **What happens**: The events, in the order they happen.
8. **The chapters**: Every chapter planned, scene by scene.
9. **Review**: Reed checks the whole board for contradictions.

## The nine styles

You pick one style in setup. It never changes. Each style holds craft guidance and 24 original example passages: three for each of eight scene kinds (arrival, argument, reveal, aftermath, action, dread, intimacy, passage of time).

| Style | Manner | Familiar authors |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Warm close third | The reader lives close to one character’s heart in warm, easy prose. | Emily Henry, Rainbow Rowell, Jojo Moyes, John Green |
| Spare and hard-edged | Short, plain sentences keep feeling under the surface for the reader to find. | Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard |
| Gothic dread | Fear grows slowly in a place that seems wrong, where what is not seen is worse than what is seen. | Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, Sarah Waters |
| Whimsical fable | A playful storyteller tells strange things plainly, with a wink at the reader. | Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Lemony Snicket |
| Noir first person | A tired narrator tells a corrupt world’s plot through a voice as revealing as the events. | Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Dennis Lehane, Megan Abbott |
| Propulsive thriller | The reader must turn the page because there is always a clock, a question and a threat. | Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, John le Carré, Michael Crichton |
| Lyrical and interior | The story moves through consciousness: memory, perception and long rhythmic sentences. | Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Marilynne Robinson |
| Ironic omniscient | An all-seeing narrator judges with humor drawn from the distance between what people say and what they mean. | Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, P. G. Wodehouse, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen |
| Mythic epic | A large world is told with weight, with history and legend behind every scene. | J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, N. K. Jemisin, Patrick Rothfuss |

## Inside the room

- **Secrets stay secret.** Each scene is written from the timeline up to that scene's event. Anything a later event reveals stays out of the scene's brief.
- **Nobody gets lost.** The Character Map shows every character against every chapter and flags a gap of eight chapters or more. Tell Reed an absence is planned, and the flag turns neutral.
- **Pacing you can see.** Calamus measures each drafted scene against the example passages of its kind in your style, for example: "28% dialogue. Dread scenes in this style have 0–5%."
- **Continuity, guarded.** Before Reed changes a Story Board page, it compares the new text with the pages it links. A conflict refuses the change.
- **Nothing is lost.** Every change Reed makes is its own history entry. You can undo a message, or turn off Direct edits to review tracked changes.
- **Share it.** On the Mac, export a story as EPUB or PDF.

## Honesty rules Reed works under

- Reed never names a book, author, quote or fact about the real world that it has not found. When it is not sure, it says so, or it searches the web.
- A fact Reed finds on the web reaches the story only on a Story Board page that carries the source link.
- Scenes add no names, places, history or secrets that the Story Board does not hold.

## Plans

### Free
- One story you can write in. Other stories open to read and export.
- Reed, the interview, the Story Board and all nine styles.
- Bring your own AI key from an OpenAI-compatible provider, such as OpenRouter.
- Story history, snapshots and automatic backups.
- No sync between devices.

### Pro (monthly or annual, price coming soon)
- Any number of stories.
- AI included: no keys, no model settings. Calamus picks the models.
- 1,500 credits each month. Annual plans get twelve months of credits at once.
- Pro sync and cloud snapshots across your devices.
- 14-day trial with a card, from Settings → Plan in the app. The trial includes 600 credits and Pro sync.
- Credits pay for Reed, drafting, continuity checks and images.

Credit packs: $5 for 500 credits; $10 for 1,100 credits (+10% bonus); $20 for 2,400 credits (+20% bonus).

## Questions

### Does Reed write my story for me?

You make the creative calls. Reed asks questions with choices to click, keeps the Story Board, and drafts one scene, or at most one chapter, each time you ask. Turn off Direct edits in a thread and Reed’s edits come to you as tracked changes to accept or refuse. Every change Reed makes is saved in your story’s history, and you can undo a message.

### Where do my stories live?

On your device, as plain Markdown files in a library folder. Story files go to our service only if you turn on Pro sync. To work, Reed sends the parts of your story it needs to the AI models: through your own provider on Free, or through our relay on a trial or Pro. The relay does not log or store prompts, replies or images.

### Do I need my own AI account?

On Free, yes: you bring the key for an OpenAI-compatible provider, such as OpenRouter, and choose the models. On a trial or Pro, Calamus supplies the AI and chooses the models. You need no key.

### Do I need an account?

No. Calamus asks for no email and no password. Pro gives you a license key, and the key is all you need on each of your devices.

### Which devices does it run on?

The apps are coming soon for Macs with Apple silicon and Android 8 or later. The whole studio runs on the device. Pro sync carries your stories between them.

### Can two people write one story together?

Not today. Pro sync is for one storyteller who writes on one device and later on another. It does not do live editing by two people at once.

### Where do the styles come from?

Each of the nine styles names the familiar authors it draws on, and holds craft guidance with 24 original example passages: three for each of eight scene kinds. None is copied from a published book. Calamus measures those passages to set each scene kind’s targets for sentence length and dialogue.

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A product of BrandCast Labs · https://calamus.cc/