Story Shuffler

A writer's companion: a manuscript shuffler that obeys ordering constraints. Try the webapp. You can hover just about any component for popup help. And don't worry — none of your data ever leaves your computer.

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A while back my wife Cislyn asked me how hard it would be to build an application that could shuffle the sections of a manuscript. Sometimes writers would like to try out a different ordering of their sections, but with some constraints in place, like "leave the beginning and end alone" or "section 4 definitely needs to come before sections 6 and 8."

As with everything, the trick is making the time. Once I finally got around to it — a year after she asked (sorry, sweetie 😅) — I knocked it out over a weekend. It was a perfect opportunity to learn something new — in this case, writing multiplatform GUIs using egui. I started with the excellent eframe template, and this project is what I came up with.

This is a screenshot from the native version. The manuscript is Cislyn's "Tides that Bind", published by Diabolical Plots.

If you are tech-savvy enough to build Rust programs from source, then knock yourself out. I might upload some native binaries at some point in the near future.

But you probably just want to use the web interface, which is here.

Pretty much everything has hover help, so hopefully correct usage is discoverable. But here's the process in a nutshell:

• Paste your manuscript into the central text area. It won't preserve rich-text formatting, sorry. This would take quite a lot of custom code, too, so I'm not sure if it's in the cards.
• Set the delimiter to your section break delimiter. The default is dinkus (* * *).
• Set any constraints. You can lock the first and last sections in place by marking the Fixed checkbox.
• Click the Shuffle button under your manuscript.
• Click the Copy to clipboard button to copy your reordered and reassembled manuscript to the system clipboard.
• Paste your new manuscript into an external document.

I had a lot of fun building this app, and I hope Story Shuffler helps somebody out.