Manri Desk

You write. The desk only underlines.

A scene-based writing desk from the Korean countryside — no account, and the manuscript lives in your own file

Sit at the desk 한국어판 안내

Three promises

What this desk keeps, all the way down

The AI writes nothing

Not one sentence, ever. It underlines. Whether to take a mark or keep your line — and the hands that do the polishing — are always yours.

The manuscript stays yours

No account, no server copy. You save to a file on your own computer; the browser only holds a working copy as a crash net. Nothing you write here is ever sent anywhere.

Judgment leaves a record

Every underline you take or keep gets a one-tap reason. The reasons accumulate into a quiet picture of your own taste — the real product of this desk.

One screen is the whole tool

Scenes on the left, manuscript in the middle, judgment on the right — no windows to juggle

Manri Desk — the full screen 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The boards on the desk

Left to right — scenes, manuscript, and judgment

ScenesSCENES

You write in scenes. Each one carries a status light (grey draft · amber watching · green done) and a live word count, so the scene you owe a second look is visible at a glance. Drag to reorder.

Untick a scene and the manuscript recalculates without it — a way to try removing without erasing.

Opening a scene shows the closing lines of the one before it — · · · previously — the actual sentences, never a summary. You land where you left off.

UnderlinesMARKS

Red pen marks a break in the facts you locked down yourself — a character, a place, a prop. Blue pencil is a hint: an adverb propping up a dialogue tag, a filter word, a suddenly, the same pair of words echoing twice within a few lines.

An underline only shows where the desk snags. Take it / keep mine — and the reason — are entirely yours.

RulesRULES

We don't set the rules. You write them. Lock a fact — “the room has no clock” — as a red-pen rule, and the desk guards that fact across the whole manuscript.

The desk arrives with twelve starter pencils, distilled from the editors English prose actually answers to — Elmore Leonard, Stephen King, Strunk & White, Browne & King. All twelve are deliberately hints, never red: promoting habits to violations is how a tool erases a writer's voice.

CardsCARDS

The things you keep scrolling back to check live on character · place · prop cards — locked facts, kept beside the manuscript.

A twist can be written down too: anything after “Secret:” stays on your desk and never enters an AI brief. If a fact must not drift, set the same fact as a red-pen rule and the desk will hold it for you.

LedgerYOUR REASONS

Every verdict takes one reason — “stands without it”, “deliberate echo”, “one-off, not a habit”. The reasons pile up into Your reasons so far: which marks you take, which you wave through, and why.

Under three judgments the desk says nothing at all — it refuses to guess your taste from thin evidence.

FilesSAVE · OPEN

⌘S saves the manuscript to your computer as a small .manri.json file — scenes, rules, cards, and your ledger, all in one. That file is the manuscript's home; the browser copy is only a crash net, and cleared site data takes it along.

In Chrome and Edge the desk quietly re-saves to the same file as you work; other browsers get a fresh download. Open moves a manuscript between machines.

Export .docx produces a manuscript-format Word file — Times New Roman 12pt, double-spaced, first-line indents — the file agents and editors actually open. Built right into the page, offline like everything else. Export .txt makes a plain reading copy.

ListenREAD ALOUD

Listen has the desk read the current scene to you — ears catch what tired eyes forgive. It uses only voices that live on your device; cloud voices are refused on principle, because they would ship your text to a server. The manuscript still never leaves your machine, even out loud.

Your AITHE DOOR

“Copy for your AI” puts a critique brief on your clipboard: the canon cards, the scene, and standing orders — point at lines, name the problem, ask questions, rewrite nothing. Take it to whatever stubborn machine you argue with.

The desk itself has no AI inside. That is not a missing feature — it's the first promise, kept structurally.

The first five minutes

From the door to your first judged underline

  1. The desk asks for nothing at the door — no account, no email. After you've exported or saved something, it asks once whether you'd like a note when the desk changes; skipping is fine and it won't ask again. (You can always find that note under "Desk updates by email" in the left drawer.)
  2. You land in a small sample manuscript, The Room Above the Bakery. Poke it: take an underline, keep one, break the no-clock canon on purpose.
  3. Press New manuscript when you're ready. The twelve starter pencils come along; the red pens you'll write yourself.
  4. Write. Paragraphs split on a blank line; words count themselves.
  5. Save early (⌘S) — put the file on your own computer. The status line at the bottom always says where the manuscript currently stands.
  6. When a blue pencil appears, read it and decide — take it or keep mine, with a reason. After three judgments the desk starts showing you your own pattern.
  7. If a deadline is watching you, press goal and give the manuscript a word target.

The manuscript file is plain JSON — readable, portable, yours. No format lock-in: the worst that can ever happen to you here is a text file.

Questions, answered

The five that come up

Do I have to save by hand?
The browser keeps a working copy automatically — but a browser is not a home. Cleared site data takes it along. Save the file early; from then on (in Chrome and Edge) the desk re-saves to it quietly while you work.
Where does my manuscript go?
Nowhere. There is no server copy at all — the only thing this desk ever sends is an email address, and only if you choose to leave one. What you write cannot leak, cannot train anything, and cannot be read by us, because it never leaves your machine.
Will the AI fix my sentences?
No — and that's deliberate, not missing. Tools that write for you push the writer's voice out a little at a time. The desk is named after a Korean fulling stone (다듬잇돌): the stone never does the smoothing — it only holds steady while you swing.
What happens with my email?
Only if you leave one: news of the desk and the books, occasionally an event — that's the agreement on the checkbox, recorded with its date. Nothing else, never passed to anyone, and unsubscribe is one reply. Leaving no email changes nothing about the desk.
Is there more of this desk somewhere?
Yes. This is the traveling version of a bigger Korean desk — 글다듬이 — which adds a structure board, read-aloud recital, foreshadowing tracking, snapshots, and submission printing. The English room grows as its writers ask.