Enemies to Lovers Beat Sheet • Save the Cat Plotting Dashboard (Digital Download)

✦ The beat sheet for the trope you actually write

Fifteen beats. Hostility, forced proximity, fracture, betrayal, surrender. Save the Cat — the structure half of Hollywood swears by — rebuilt for the trope that breaks your readers. Every beat carries an Enemies to Lovers lens note: how that beat usually manifests when your two leads start the book wanting each other dead.

This is the dashboard I built for myself when I got tired of trying to bend a generic three-act outline around a near-kiss midpoint that has to pull *harder* than the one before it. It is opinionated. It is dark. It assumes you know why your protagonist is dangerous before she ever lets him touch her.

✦ What's in the file

A single interactive HTML dashboard. No install. No subscription. No login. You open the file and the tool is already yours.

Inside:

— Overview tab with a progress ring, beats-done snapshot, act breakdown, and a quick note pad
— Beats tab with all 15 beats laid out vertically, each one carrying:
· the standard Save the Cat screenplay percentage
· an Enemies to Lovers lens note explaining how that beat tends to land in this trope
· a synopsis textarea for your version of the scene
· a status badge that cycles empty → draft → done
— Characters tab for protagonist, antagonist / love interest, confidant, and supporting cast — with fields for old wound, want, need, and arc across the fifteen beats
— Calculator tab that maps every beat to a target page number for your manuscript length
— Settings tab with language switch (EN / PT-BR / IT), three themes, JSON export, JSON import, restore demo, clear all

✦ The six beats that decide whether a dark romance lands

The dashboard treats these six as the structural spine of the trope and pulls them forward:

— Beat 1 · Opening Image — first impression is hostility, not attraction
— Beat 4 · Catalyst — the event that forces them together despite the hatred
— Beat 7 · B Story — the first crack, a moment of unexpected humanity neither will speak of
— Beat 9 · Midpoint — the false peak, they almost cross the line and pull back harder
— Beat 11 · All Is Lost — the betrayal beat, one does exactly what the other feared
— Beat 13 · Break into Three — the choice to stop fighting the feeling

Get these six right and the book holds. The lens notes show you what *right* looks like for this trope specifically.

✦ How to work it

Open the file. Restore the demo if you want to see how a full pass reads (the seeded example is a mafia romance — Eleanora and Dante, blood debt, arranged marriage, balcony in the rain). Then clear all data and write your own. Everything saves to your browser as you type. Export to JSON when you want a backup or want to move between machines. Import to drop the backup back in.

If you write three books a year in this trope, you reuse the file. The structure is the same. The story is yours.

✦ Who this is for

Romance authors who write dark, who write hot, who write the kind of book where the love interest is genuinely dangerous and the protagonist is the only person sharp enough to be in a room with him. Mafia romance, fantasy romance with morally grey kings, romantasy, dark academia romance, captive romance, arranged marriage, marriage of convenience that turns into something neither of them survives.

If your first draft tends to soften the enemy too early — this is the dashboard for you. The lens notes hold the line.

✦ Languages

Interface in English, Portuguese (BR), and Italian. The beat lens notes stay in English so the craft language is consistent.

✦ Format & delivery

One .html file. Works in any modern browser — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge. No internet required after the file loads once. Your work lives in your browser's localStorage and never touches a server. Export to JSON anytime to keep a backup outside the browser.

Delivered as instant digital download via Etsy. No physical shipment.

✦ License

Personal use license — yours forever. Plot as many books as you want with it. Use it for your own writing, including books you sell. Do not resell or redistribute the file itself, do not include it in courses or bundles, do not strip the credit. Full license terms in the included PDF.

✦ A note

I write dark romance. I built this for the writers I drink with. If a beat lens lands wrong for the kind of dark you write, the synopsis area is yours — overwrite what I gave you. The lens is the door, not the room.

— Daelin

AI-assisted: product content, code and listing images are produced with AI tools. Concept, structure and creative direction are my own.