Story Lathe© is what I use to write my manuscripts.
I developed Story Lathe because, you know... I wanted to spin a good tale.

I've used Linux for many years, so when I started writing my first draft manuscript, LibreOffice. was the obvious choice. However, it got to a stage where keeping track of character names, reference images, bibliography, plot points, notes and a multitude of world building lore became a real challenge. I know that there are tools in the Libreoffice suite that could have provided some of this functionality, but I did not have the skills to do all the integration required and it would have been a steep learning curve.
I also wanted to do things that were not really available as far as I could see.

So I did what any sane(?) person with a developer background would do, and built a quick app.

I was faced with a problem. The tools were divorced from the manuscript in LibreOffice writer. I was consistently copying things back and forth making corrections as I went and that approach became pretty stale. I had to enhance my application to make it a full editor and finally everything was going to be in one place.
So, Story Lathe came into being.

I now had a single source of the truth that was integrated to the manuscript editor. Quick access to the core story elements, cross referenced to a workable point. I also wanted to automate some editing and analysis functions.

I did try a few available professional tools, but they all had deficiencies in functionality sets that I wanted.

It took 2 years of trial and error. Lots of errors, lots of modifications and enhancements.
I was still learning the craft of writing and I refined the functionality to reflect my slowly growing skills.

As soon as a need became apparent, I could quickly build new functionality to help me on the journey.

Most of the major changes I've done recently are to help me facilitate the copying of data to this website.
I still do some tinkering and there are always undiscovered errors lurking in the hidden depths of oft' unused logic paths.