Liminalis“I've written ninety thousand words and I've lost the thread.”
The Novel lens is for the part of long fiction that isn't sentence-writing: knowing what you've already established, which threads are still live, whose arc turns where, and what you set up in book one that nothing has ever paid off.
“Which thread am I dropping, and where?”
Plot threads and character arcs become spines. Beats are placed on a book × chapter grid. A thread that quietly dies after chapter eleven stops being a nagging feeling and becomes a row with nothing in it.
| Spine | Book I — The Cartographer's Debt | Book II — The Longer Road | Book III | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ch 1–4 | ch 5–8 | ch 9–12 | ch 13–16 | ch 1–6 | ch 7–12 | ch 13–18 | ch 1–8 | ch 9–14 | |
| The compassthread · main | setup | turn | turn | turn | pay | ||||
| Wren — want / liecharacter arc | ghost | t1 | t2 | t3 | break | need | |||
| Marisol's ledgerthread · secondary | setup | turn | turn | pay | |||||
| The amber hallthread · motif | setup | turn | |||||||
| Corvin — the ghostcharacter arc | ghost | t1 | t2 | t3 | need | ||||
| The guild collapsethread · world | setup | turn | turn | turn | turn | pay | turn | pay | |
A build order, not a blank page.
Planning a series is a dependency graph pretending to be a document. Liminalis makes the dependencies explicit: every stage is generated against everything decided before it, and you edit each one before the next runs. Nothing is committed silently — stages arrive as drafts you accept, revise, or throw away.
Nine stages
- Premise
- Themes & throughlines
- World & setting
- Political landscape
- Factions & powers
- Series arc
- Endgame
- Recurring cast plan
- Book breakdown
Eight stages
- Book premise
- Arc slice
- Threads in this book
- Character arc turns
- Act structure
- Chapter outline
- Cast delta
- Continuity check
The rest of the toolkit.
Character arcs as first-class objects
Want, need, lie and ghost, tracked separately from the static character profile, with turning points placed as beats on the grid. A character sheet tells you who someone is. An arc tells you where they're going and when they get there.
Narrator voice, per character
A voice profile — diction, cadence, worldview, verbal tics — derived from a character's own file and the scenes they appear in. Chapters name their narrator, and that voice layers into narration for those chapters.
Narrator style, project-wide
A tone and prose-style block that stays in context on every turn — generated either from parameters you set, or by analysing your own writing so the system's suggestions sound like the book they're going into.
Chronicles
Ask how two characters' relationship develops across everything you've written, or how a motif threads through the work, and get back a document that stitches the actual sources together — which then becomes an ordinary document in the project.
Scaffolding and derivation
Generate the book/act/chapter skeleton. Derive thread spines from what you've written. Derive character arcs. Derive beats. Every one of them lands as reviewable documents rather than as hidden state.
The advisory audit
Two passes, deliberately separated by cost:
- Cheap and deterministic, straight off the beat graph — dropped threads, unpaid setups, missing arc turns, orphaned beats.
- A model pass for the judgement calls — timeline coherence, point of view, plausibility, pacing.
Findings arrive with proposed fixes you review. Nothing is ever auto-applied to your manuscript.
Every document is marked as authored — yours, canon — or generated — the system's, provisional. On top of that sits a canon status: canonical, draft, variant, or ask for a flagged continuity question. The assistant is instructed to prefer your text over its own on any conflict, and to treat a flagged document as a question rather than as a fact. Two people co-writing get a shared record of what is settled instead of an average of their contradictions.
Build the world without leaving the conversation
/create a world document grounded in existing material · /populate to find gaps and propose what
fills them · /relationship and /thread for chronicles · /derive threads and
/derive arcs for weave-board spines · /svalidate for the cross-cutting audit.
Results render in the chat and nothing is added until you accept it.
What happens when you import a manuscript.
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You import, and keep working
Analysis runs in the background and never on the save path. The editor doesn't block on a model, ever.
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A reverse index appears
Every character, place, object, thread and motif, with what each is in versus merely mentioned in. Built by deterministic matching, so it's readable and correctable rather than opaque.
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Motifs collect what folders separated
Thematically-linked scenes get tagged with shared theme-language, so material that belongs together but lives in five different folders can finally be pulled together.
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You ask a question that spans the draft
“What has Wren actually been told about the compass, and when?” — and get an answer built from the vignettes that bear on it, with every source listed and scored.