The Writing Record

Sessions#

A session is one stretch of writing on one book with no gap longer than fifteen minutes between saves. Verkilo opens one with your first save and closes it on its own once you’ve stopped for fifteen minutes, or when you close the project. When a session closes, every section you changed in it gets a version snapshot, so Version History reads like a diary of the draft.

To see them:

1. Press ⌘⇧A / Ctrl+Shift+A, or choose Go → Analytics (the same Writing History window as the heatmap).
2. Click Sessions, beside Daily, Weekly and Monthly.
3. Click any day on the heatmap to see only that day’s sessions. Click it again, or the date chip, to clear the filter.

Each row shows when the session started, how long it ran, how many saves it took, its net words, a bar of where those words came from, and how many sections it touched.

Sessions from before the record existed are rebuilt from Verkilo’s save log and marked reconstructed: they carry times, saves and sections, but no word numbers.

Where the words came from#

Every save records the change in word count and its origin. The legend above the table totals them for the project (or the book you’ve filtered to):

• Typed: your own writing and deleting.
• Pasted: text you brought in from the clipboard.
• AI accepted: words from AI line-edit suggestions you accepted, shown as words in and words out. A rewrite that swaps eight words for eight is “8 in / 8 out”, not zero.
• AI corrected: spelling, grammar and punctuation fixes you accepted from a line edit, counted as words touched. These are copyedits, and they are kept apart from rewrites so a proofreading pass never reads as co-authorship.
• Agent: words written by an AI agent you connected over the local API.
• Imported and Restored: whole-document moves that nobody typed.

The record errs toward disclosing more, never less: pasting over a paragraph shows both the paste and the words it replaced.

Checking the record#

Each closed session carries a hash chained to the one before it. Click Verify to recompute the chain: Verkilo tells you every session recomputes correctly, or names the first one that doesn’t. This is a consistency check on your own machine, not a certificate from anyone else.

Exporting the record#

1. In Writing History, pick the book you want with the book filter (or leave it on the book you have open).
2. Click Export PDF for a document you can hand to someone, or Export JSON for the raw record.
3. Choose where to save it.

The export includes totals by origin, every session, first and last write per section, every AI operation and whether you accepted it, every manual adjustment, the hash chain, and a page explaining exactly how the record is made. Exporting closes your current session first, so the record is complete up to that moment.

On the copyright page#

If the record lists AI operations for a book and you haven’t set an AI disclosure, the book’s Copyright tab says so and offers the standard wording in one click. What you disclose is your call; the record just makes sure you know.