| name | slow-novel-storyteller |
| description | Use when designing, operating, repairing, or cleanly rewriting a high-quality long-form novel workflow that writes slowly by paragraph, preserves author-written source authority, separates novelist/whole-story critic/prose critic/translator sessions, leaves narrative space, rejects dense AI-like or lifeless prose, resumes durably, or publishes clean chapter PDFs. |
Slow Novel Storyteller
Build the smallest durable system that protects literary attention. The novelist should receive story and author context, not agent, code, database, TeX, git, or deployment narration.
Prepare The Inheritance
- Inventory author drafts, notes, beatboards, personal writing, research, later AI drafts, and current steering.
- Rank provenance before combining material. Read source-authority.md.
- Extract an author core: recurring struggles, pleasures, moral tensions, sense of humor, desired reader experience, and contradictions that must stay alive.
- Treat copyrighted reading as craft study. Abstract causality, scene scale, dialogue pressure, and structure; never copy phrases, characters, or distinctive plots.
When an existing draft is fundamentally the wrong novel, preserve it as diagnostic evidence and start a clean edition. Do not let accepted-looking prose force continuity merely because it already exists. Read paragraph-rewrite-loop.md before repairing dense, strange, shallow, boring, overcomposed, or mechanically plain fiction.
Separate Roles
Use independent persistent sessions:
- Novelist: writes one prose paragraph and accumulates emotional/continuity memory.
- Whole-story critic: asks whether the paragraph still opens and advances the right book.
- Prose critic: reads once like an ordinary reader, then checks clarity, rhythm, naturalness, blank space, and momentum.
- Translator: works only from accepted source prose, a glossary, and nearby continuity.
An outer deterministic layer owns schemas, state, retries, files, compilation, version control, and publishing. Pass artifacts explicitly between roles. Read session-architecture.md before implementing resumability.
Write One Chapter
- Enforce the daily limit in durable state using a local calendar date, not only in a prompt.
- Decide only the current chapter's contract and title. Do not freeze every future title.
- Write one paragraph at a time from the contract, accepted prose, story memory, and newest author note.
- Run the independent gate in quality-gates.md.
- Return precise criticism to the same novelist session. Allow a bounded number of complete rewrites; watch for the revision pendulum from ornate density to lifeless summary. Block for review rather than accepting a weak final attempt.
- Translate only after source prose passes. Review the translation for natural target-language prose and factual fidelity.
- Persist accepted text immediately. Rebuild a current reader artifact, then commit only scoped outputs.
- Close the chapter only after its promised irreversible turn and immediate aftermath. Save a continuity summary; decide the next chapter on a later day.
Publish For Reading
- Keep English/source and translated chapter files separate.
- Generate clean pocket PDFs with a cover and readable type.
- Back up the existing owner PDF before changing its LaTeX source.
- Sync atomically and verify checksums.
- Export only reader PDFs to shared folders; keep prompts, databases, logs, TeX, and backups private.
Completion Check
- Daily limit is tested and survives restart.
- Sessions resume by stable role and can be reseeded from durable literary context.
- Every accepted paragraph changes the scene in a concrete way.
- Every retained sentence changes action, choice, knowledge, relationship, power, risk, cost, position, or available path; quiet beats must still perform dramatic work.
- A reader understands the action without having every meaning explained.
- Blank space comes from trusted action and subtext, not missing antecedents or obscure wording.
- User steering reaches the next unwritten paragraph without silently rewriting accepted prose.
- A reader can open the latest chapter in both requested languages.
- No technical pipeline language appears in the fiction.
