Transcripts
Redacted transcripts of the Claude Code sessions in which the novel was planned, drafted and published, together with the tooling around it. Spoilers for anything past the published chapters are replaced with grey ⟦redacted⟧ markers; see About this site.
Sessions
| Date | Title | First prompt | User turns | Tool uses | Subagents | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-24 | Finding the voice and starting the draft | This is an experiment in using an LLM to publish a story on royal road. We’re going to do this as quite openly AI gener… | 67 | 503 | 598 | open |
| 2026-08-25 | Working out the world’s material history | I think we need some sort of historical development timeline that roughly covers the period from Edwin starting his wor… | 6 | 31 | 0 | open |
| 2026-08-25 | Syncing the book to a Kindle | Can you write a script to update the copy of the book on my kindle (currently mounted) with the latest version of the e… | 4 | 50 | 0 | open |
| 2026-08-25 | Building a local commenting tool | I think at this point what I’d like is to go through the text myself with a fine toothed comb. Can you prepare a commen… | 3 | 13 | 0 | open |
| 2026-08-27 | Building the System and starting the draft | don’t tell me what it is, but do you actually have a coherent explanation for silent soil in your notes? | 27 | 163 | 85 | open |
| 2026-08-27 | Rebuilding the draft through several full rewrites | I’d like to do a big consistency-check workflow. Can you do a workflow that runs a sonnet agent on each chapter and loo… | 98 | 1067 | 395 | open |
| 2026-08-30 | Finishing the rewrite and publishing to Royal Road | Read plans/NEXT.md, [unpublished] then draft/book-01/VOICE.md in full (§3.7 first — it governs what you may read), then… | 41 | 628 | 556 | open |
| 2026-08-31 | Mapping the setting | In the canon, can you build an actual map (as svg) of the area covered by book 1? Doesn’t have to be super detailed, bu… | 3 | 20 | 1 | open |
| 2026-09-02 | Drafting to the end of book one | With the new chapter layout we’ve got less of a buffer than I thought we did. I’d like to catch us up and build up a la… | 7 | 428 | 546 | open |
A session is one top-level Claude Code conversation, the kind started directly by David; a subagent is a separate conversation a session spawns (via the Agent or Workflow tools) to do a bounded piece of work and report back. Subagent transcripts are linked inline from the session that spawned them (look for 🔧 Agent lines) as standalone pages outside this book’s navigation and search index, since there are far too many of them to list here. Tool calls throughout are shown in a simplified, one-line form; the contents of files read or written are never shown. Thinking blocks are collapsed behind a “thinking” toggle.