| name | book-planning |
| description | Run the planning stage — write the style guide, design the structure, and produce one brief per chapter. Use after the spec is settled and before any drafting. |
Planning
The stage that makes parallel drafting possible. Everything the writing team does
well or badly is decided here.
voice-designer → outline-architect
style guide outline + briefs + manifest
Style guide first: prose conventions affect chapter sizing, and an outline built
before the voice is settled gets re-cut.
The output that matters
Three artefacts, and the third carries the load:
guides/style-guide.mdoutline/outline.md — arc, chapter map, boundaries, drafting orderoutline/briefs/<id>-<slug>.md — one contract per chapter
Plus the chapter entries in book.toml, which is structure of record.
Why the brief is load-bearing
A chapter writer reads its brief, the style guide, its research notes and the
continuity ledger. It reads no other chapter. So everything that would
otherwise come from reading adjacent chapters has to be in the brief — including
the neighbour summaries and, above all, must not cover.
If briefs are thin, writers compensate by reading, and the architecture collapses
back into one large context without anything visibly failing.
Judge a brief by asking: could someone who has never seen this book write this
chapter from it, and would the result sit correctly beside its neighbours?
Boundaries
For every pair of chapters that could plausibly both cover something, decide the
owner and write it into both briefs — "must cover" in one, "must not cover" in
the other. Undecided boundaries are where duplication comes from, and neither
writer will notice it.
Continuity keys
Populate establishes and requires in book.toml. A chapter may only require
what an earlier chapter establishes.
python3 scripts/book.py scaffold
python3 scripts/book.py lint
Drafting order is not chapter order
- Best-sourced material first — it sets the voice everything else is audited
against, and the style guide gets corrected cheaply while only one chapter
depends on it.
- Most volatile facts last — numbers decay, and drafting them early means
drafting them twice.
- Record which chapters cannot share a batch: any two drawing on the same
source for the same purpose.
Set status = "outline" when done.
