| name | continue-narrative |
| description | Assess where the building-narrative blog sequence stands and decide the next move — draft the next beat or wait. Use BEFORE draft-blog-post whenever the task is to continue the building narrative: "what's the next beat", "continue the story", "review the logs since X and assess narrative beats", "where are we in the narrative", or any narrative-continuation/assessment work. Loads the conceptual model (linear-and-continuous, advance-the-front, narrative-vs-insight, wait-when-no-beat-has-formed) that templates don't carry, so the stance is right before any drafting. Hands off to draft-blog-post once a beat is confirmed. |
continue-narrative
The upstream step before drafting: figure out where the building narrative is and whether the next beat has taken shape. This skill exists because the stance of the narrative as a serial practice kept getting reconstructed wrong each session (treating uncovered days as a "gap to fill" instead of a story to advance). It loads the model so that doesn't happen.
Read first: docs/internal/planning/comms/building-narrative-method.md — the canonical model. This skill is the §5 continuation discipline; the doc is the full model behind it. If anything here is ambiguous, the doc governs.
When to Use
- PM asks "what's the next narrative beat", "continue the story", "where are we in the building narrative"
- "Review the logs since [date] and assess potential narrative beats"
- Picking up narrative-slate planning or deciding whether to publish the next beat
- Any time you're about to advance the building narrative — run this BEFORE
draft-blog-post
NOT for: insight pieces (time-decoupled — different logic), Weekly Ships (Exec-owned), or drafting a beat that's already confirmed (go straight to draft-blog-post).
The model in one breath (full version in the method doc §1)
- The building narrative is LINEAR and CONTINUOUS: it has a front (the latest work-day a beat covers), not a coverage-map with holes. You advance the front; you never backfill gaps.
- Narratives are chronological beats; insights are time-decoupled. Mining a date range for insights does NOT advance the narrative front. Count beats, not insights.
- When the next beat hasn't taken shape (work since the front hasn't resolved into a story, or it's unclear how to continue), you wait. Waiting is a correct, expected state — not a miss (Time Lord doctrine).
The discipline (run this)
-
Find the front. In editorial-calendar.csv, identify the most recent work-day covered by a building-narrative beat (drafted OR queued OR published). Use the beat's source-work-period (notes / workDate), not pubDate. Count beats only — not insights (insights don't move the front).
-
Read the work since the front. Review logs for the days after the front. Omnibi (the efficient digest) live in docs/omnibus-logs/{date}-omnibus-log.md; fall back to per-day session logs (dev/YYYY/MM/DD/) for days without an omnibus yet. Read the source — don't reconstruct from memory (Chief-reads-logs discipline).
-
Assess whether a next beat has taken shape. Did the post-front work resolve into a story beat — a clear arc, a tension, a turn? Is it clear how the sequence continues?
- Yes → it's a beat. If several beats are forming, treat them as a slate (draft long, then tighten — method doc §1.4). Add the calendar row at creation (orphan-prevention). Hand off to
draft-blog-post.
- No / ambiguous → wait. Say so plainly to PM, and say what you'd want to see before it's a beat. Do not force a beat to fill a slot.
-
Never backfill. If the span between the front and now was skipped at the beat level (e.g., mined only for insights), do NOT retroactively fill it unless PM explicitly decides a specific beat is worth telling. Advance from the front.
-
Bring candidates to PM for discussion when the assessment is exploratory ("assess potential beats") rather than a clean single next-beat. Present candidate beats with through-lines + source-days; let PM steer slate shape. This mirrors how slates are actually built (draft-long → PM push → tighten).
Handoff
Once a beat (or slate) is confirmed: create the calendar row(s) via update-calendar, then draft-blog-post for each beat. If the verdict is "wait," record that in the cycle log / standing-items so the next session knows the front and why we're holding.
v1.0 — encodes §5 of building-narrative-method.md. The method doc is the source of truth for the model; update the doc when the model evolves, and bump this skill if the discipline steps change.
