Calendar Settings

Your book's calendar shapes how every date appears in your story: from a character's birthday to the day a kingdom falls. Calendar Settings is where you choose the system that fits your world, and dial in the details.

You'll find this page at Settings > Calendar. Changes save automatically as you type, and sample dates on the right side of the Calendar Settings page update as you change settings, so you can see what your dates will look like before committing.

Calendar Modes

Calendar Mode

Choose the calendar system for this book. It shapes how every date and event is displayed.

Gregorian Calendar

Standard real-world calendar. Works for most stories.

Day Counter

A numeric day count like "Day 1" or "Day -45". Useful for when dates do not really matter.

Custom Calendar

Design your own months, weekdays, and time units for fantasy or sci-fi. High flexibility, but more complex.

Figure 1.1 - The three calendar modes, chosen from a dropdown at the top of the page

Penpoint offers three calendar modes. Pick the one that matches your story. You can switch any time, but switching clears the dates inside your Calendar blocks (the small date markers you place inside scenes), and nothing else. Your characters, chapters, notes, and everything else stay safe, and Penpoint will pop up a confirmation dialog with a Cancel button before anything happens.

Gregorian Calendar

The standard real-world calendar: twelve months, seven-day weeks, leap years, the works. This is the default and works for any contemporary, historical, or near-future story. If your book is set on Earth, this is almost certainly what you want.

Day Counter

Just a number. "Day 1", "Day 47", "Day -12". No months, no weekdays. Useful for stories where the actual date doesn't matter, only the passage of time:

Survival or post-apocalyptic stories that count days from a triggering event
Mission logs and ship's-day journals in science fiction
Any narrative structured around "Day 1, Day 2..." rather than calendar dates

Custom Calendar

Build your own calendar from scratch: design your months, weekdays, hours per day, leap days, and epochs. Best for fantasy and science fiction worlds where Earth's calendar doesn't apply. Custom Calendar walks through every option in depth.

Switching Modes

Note: Switching calendar modes clears every calendar date in your book, but ONLY the dates inside Calendar blocks (small date fields you can drop into any scene). Everything else in your book stays safe: chapters, characters, items, locations, notes, tags, moons, arcs, and your manuscript prose. A confirmation dialog shows up before anything is cleared, and there is a Cancel button if you change your mind.

Penpoint preserves your Custom calendar configuration when you switch away from it. So if you spent an hour designing a 13-month fantasy calendar, then decide to try Day Counter mode for a chapter, you can switch back to Custom later and find your months, weekdays, and rules exactly as you left them.

Epochs (Gregorian)

Epochs

For stories set in ancient history. Turn this on to show era labels like BCE or BC on your dates.

Enable epochs

Negative years display with the "before" label, positive years with the "after" label.

Notation style

Figure 2.1 - Epochs for historical fiction

For historical fiction set before the modern era, turn on Epochs to display "44 BCE" or "44 BC" instead of just "-44". Penpoint offers two notation styles:

BCE / CE: Before Common Era / Common Era. The modern academic standard.
BC / AD: Before Christ / Anno Domini. The traditional Christian notation.

Click the style you prefer. The change applies to every Calendar block in your book: negative years get the "before" label, positive years get the "after" label.

Custom calendars get a richer version of this: pick from BCE/CE-style with your own labels ("Pre-Dragon" / "Post-Dragon") OR full named eras (named periods like "Reign of King Valdris" with their own start years). See Custom Calendar for the full walkthrough.

Moons

Track lunar cycles and see their phases on every date. Useful for fantasy worlds where celestial events shape the narrative — eclipses, high tides, magical conjunctions.

Display moons

When on, current phases appear below the date in every Calendar block.

Orbitdays per cycle

On Day 1, Year 1

Moon Color

Figure 3.1 - Two moons configured: Earth's Luna and a fantasy second moon

Moons are available in every calendar mode. Add up to eight orbiting moons for your world, and their phases will appear below every Calendar block date, so you (and your readers, if you reference moons in prose) always know what the night sky looks like.

Adding a Moon

Click Add moon to create a new moon row, or Add Earth's Moon for an instant ready-made Luna with a real surface image and a 29.53-day cycle. Each moon has these settings:

Name: How the moon is labeled in scenes (e.g., "Luna", "Selene", "The Red Sister")
Orbit: How many days the moon takes to complete one full cycle. Decimals are allowed: Earth's moon is 29.53 days.
On Day 1, Year 1: What phase the moon is in on the very first day of your calendar. Pick from the eight classical phases (New Moon, Waxing Crescent, First Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full Moon, Waning Gibbous, Last Quarter, Waning Crescent). Every other date calculates from there.
Moon Color: Pick a face color from the palette, or click Use image to upload a custom moon surface (which gets cropped to a circle).

On each moon row you'll see a small arrow on the right (click to fold the moon's settings out of the way) and a trash icon (click to delete the moon). Removal is instant: there's no confirmation dialog, so click carefully. The trash icon only deletes the moon definition (your scenes, prose, and dates aren't touched), so the worst case is you re-add the moon and re-pick its color or image.

Showing Moons on Dates

The Display moons switch at the top of the Moons section controls whether phases appear below every Calendar block date. It turns on automatically when you add your first moon. Turn it off if your moons exist for worldbuilding reference only and you don't want them showing up in scenes.

Tip: Each Calendar block also has its own moon settings: you can hide moons on a specific block, choose whether to show each moon's name and current phase next to its picture (or just show the picture, with the name and phase appearing on hover), and pick a moon size. The page-level Display moons switch is the main on/off switch: it controls whether moons show at all; the per-block settings only matter when moons ARE showing.

How Calendar Settings Affect Your Book

Every Calendar block in every scene reads from these settings. A Calendar block is a small date field you can drop into a scene to mark when it happens (a single moment, or a date range). Change Epoch settings here, and they update on every Calendar block at once. Add a moon, and it appears on every date.

Note: The Timeline page doesn't show calendar dates. Calendar dates live inside Calendar blocks on individual scenes.

Live Preview

As you change settings, the preview pane on the right side of the page updates instantly. Every Calendar block has two states: Edit Mode (what you see when picking a date in a scene) and View Mode (what shows up afterward in your prose). The preview shows two stacked examples (Edit Mode above View Mode) so you can confirm your changes look right before saving them across your whole book.