Cast and Geenius OS profiles
How the cast works in Author: characters, places and objects made in Author or linked from Geenius OS profiles, roles, snapshots and what happens when a profile changes.
The cast of a book is the characters, places, objects, weather and organisations the story uses.
Two ways to make a cast member#
- In Author. Make a character, place, object, weather or organisation directly. It belongs to your workspace and is never touched by a Geenius OS sync.
- From Geenius OS. Link a profile from your Geenius OS Profiles. The cast then holds a reference to the profile and its revision. The profile stays in the OS; you describe a person once and use them in every book.
Geenius OS is optional. You can write a whole book without it.
Roles#
A cast entry can have a role: protagonist, antagonist, supporting, minor, narrator, setting, object, weather or organisation, and a note.
Snapshots#
Author keeps a snapshot of each linked profile: its revision, kind, name, summary, facets and its located_in and part_of relations. So a book opens and checks without a network call.
- A sync reads the profiles from Geenius OS as you, with a short-lived token. It runs from Sync from Geenius OS, by itself when the snapshots are more than ten minutes old, and before any action that names a profile.
- A newer revision in the OS shows on the cast as changed in Geenius OS.
- A profile deleted in the OS stays as a snapshot marked missing, so the book still reads.
- Settings, Geenius OS picks the workspace the profiles come from.
Facts and story#
Facts about a person (their birth date, their occupation) live in the profile. What happens to them in the story lives in Author as events. The state of a character at a moment is the profile plus the events up to then. See Events and state.
Permissions#
Linking uses a read-only permission for your Geenius OS profiles, granted when you sign in with Geenius OS. Author stores the permission sealed.