Track foreshadowing: every setup and its payoff

Foreshadowing is the promise a long story makes to its reader. Writers in every market say the same thing about it: the setups you plant early are the ones you forget to pay off, and AI tools are worst at it. A Xiaohongshu note on 伏笔, as Chinese web-novel writers call it, puts it bluntly: AI cannot do foreshadowing.

The problem

In The Salt Road, Mara finds a locked tin box in chapter 1, and a stranger leaves her a second key in chapter 2. Oren owes the harbourmaster forty silver. By chapter 40 nobody remembers which of these the book has answered.

How Scenaloom handles it

1. Select the words in a chapter and choose Setup, then Plants a setup. Later, select the payoff and choose Pays off an open setup. You can also add one by hand.
2. The ledger shows each setup with the chapter it was planted in, the chapter it pays off in, and its status: open, paid off or dropped. A payoff can never come before its setup.
3. The continuity check lists the setups still open at any chapter you choose, for free. Find unpaid setups is an AI read of the whole book for setups you never logged.

The result

Every promise in the book is on one page, with links back to the line that made it. Before you publish chapter 40, you know which threads are still open and decide whether to pay them off or drop them on purpose.