2026-08-31

The book went live on Royal Road, after the second and third acts were redrafted scene by scene and a full pass hunted for leftover machine-prose habits.

After the previous night’s rejection of the second act, the day went on redrafting it, and then the third, one scene at a time through a deliberately gated pipeline: draft, a self-check against flat restatement, a canon-consistency check, a craft-quality review, a check against the overlap tool for reused phrasing. Each scene was committed and shown to David before the next began. Early on, Claude noticed it had read some of the old, contaminated scenes into its own context while drafting a new one. It stopped to flag the risk rather than continuing, and the discussion that followed got written into the project’s voice rules as a standing precaution. David gradually loosened the gate as trust built, moving from approving scene by scene to approving in batches, and by the end asked for the rest of the act to be drafted straight through without further review at that level of detail.

A short separate session added an SVG map of the story’s setting to the project’s canon, generated from the geography notes already on file.

With the draft finished, the day pivoted to publishing. The book’s title was settled as “How to Save the World”, a blurb was drafted and revised, and Claude built a tool to convert the manuscript’s markdown into the HTML format Royal Road expects, then reverse-engineered the site’s own submission flow well enough to script the upload rather than doing it by hand. A large automated pass, several hundred small review agents in total, went through the whole book hunting for the LLM prose tells flagged back on the first day, adverb habits and overused sentence shapes among them. This pass also caught an entire invented dialect for rural speech. David read it back, decided it didn’t belong, and it was reverted across every scene that used it. Royal Road’s chapter-length norms turned out to be longer than the individual scenes ran, so the first forty scenes were regrouped into eighteen longer chapters before publishing.

By the end of the day the fiction was live on Royal Road, first chapters up immediately, the rest queued to release daily.

Session transcripts: scene-by-scene redraft, map addition