Series Canon

What it is

Every book carries its own facts. Book 1 says Maren has grey eyes and was born in the flood year. Book 3 says her brother is two years older. Book 4 says the northern pass closes in winter. Each fact is true inside its own book. The series canon is what you get when all of them have to be true at once.

Canon is StoryHelm’s structured record of one book’s characters, places, factions, items and events. Series canon joins those records across every book in the series, so the Maren in Book 1 and the Maren in Book 4 are read as one character with one history. A fact can belong to a single book, or to the series itself when it holds for all of them.

Where it comes from

• Your manuscripts. The analysis reads each book and pulls out the characters, places and events the text establishes. These arrive as suggestions. You approve each one, and StoryHelm records who approved it and when.
• Your notes. Story Elements reads raw notes, quotes the lines each entry came from, and hands you a candidate to review before anything is added.
• Your own entries. Facts you add or edit by hand count as settled. The analysis does not overwrite them.

What gets checked across books

Once the books share one canon, StoryHelm can compare what each book says about the same thing. A series check looks for six kinds of drift:

• Traits. A stable fact that changes between books: an eye color, a scar, a birth year, a birthplace.
• Identity. A name, title or role that no longer matches the character it belongs to.
• Relationships. A sister who becomes a cousin, an enemy who was never introduced as one.
• World rules. Magic, technology or law that works one way in Book 1 and another in Book 3.
• Existence. A character, place or object present in one book and gone, or never there, in another.
• Voice. A character whose speech shifts between books for no reason the story gives.

Before a difference is reported, StoryHelm checks that the two entries really are the same person or thing. Two characters who happen to share a name are not reported as one character contradicting herself.

StoryHelm builds the series canon from what your books say and what you confirm. It never invents a fact to fill a gap, and it never writes your prose. When a series check finds two books that disagree, each finding appears as an observation on the Continuity page, with the passages from both books side by side. You decide which version is true, and your decision is recorded. One canon across every book, with cross-book contradiction detection, is part of the Series plan.

An example

A four-book fantasy series. One character, two books, one fact that moved.