The Author's Intelligent Sounding Board & Novel Production Studio

A disciplined workspace and structural sounding board for novelists collaborating with AI agents.

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Writing a Novel is Hard. Most AI Tools Make It Worse.

If you are a creative writer who has experimented with AI writing tools, you have likely felt the deep frustration of machines that try to seize the keyboard:

• The Dread of Voice Flattening: Autonomous AI rewriters strip away your personal style, quirky cadences, regional dialects, and raw emotional texture—sanding your prose down into polite, homogenous corporate sludge.
• The "40,000-Word Murk": Deep in the messy middle of a book, you spend precious writing hours cross-referencing notes to remember what color Lord Corvus's eyes were in Chapter 2, whether the alchemist's key was silver or brass, or when a dormant subplot was last mentioned.
• Outlining Paralysis vs. Discovery Chaos: Rigid plotting software forces you to plan every chapter before writing a word, while freeform blank documents leave you drowning without structural guidance.
• The Black-Box Rewrite Trap: When conventional AI tools offer edits, they dump wholesale rewrites into your document, leaving you wondering what changed, destroying your subtext, and stealing your artistic ownership.

Soundingboard was built on a radically different premise:

The author is the novelist. The AI is the Executive Editorial Assistant, Continuity Sentry, Master Librarian, and Craft Sounding Board.

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The Foundational Values Built Into Soundingboard

1. The System Bends to the Author, Never the Other Way Around: You set the tempo. Work in whatever mode and tool you love:
   • Solo Mode: You write 100% of the prose in your favorite editor (Obsidian, Scrivener, Microsoft Word, iA Writer, VS Code). The AI operates strictly as your tireless librarian, continuity tracker, and diagnostic reader.
   • Hybrid Mode: You and the AI volley beats, bounce brainstorms, unstick tangled plot logic, or bloom sensory details together.
   • Generative Mode (On Demand Only): The AI drafts scenes from your beat sheets only when you explicitly request it.
2. The Scene is the Atomic Dramatic Quantum: Chapters are packaging, pacing, and reading-experience choices; scenes are the true dramatic events. In Soundingboard, scenes exist as independent, atomic units with their own POV, emotional value shifts, and 5-commandment turning points. You can write the climax first, draft an unassigned scene, or restructure your chapter playlists without ever breaking a file path.
3. The Red Pen Stays in the Human's Hand (The Bracket Method): The AI never silently or unilaterally rewrites your prose.
   • In Developmental Editing: Suggestions and structural directions are quarantined in brackets [like this] using Dwight Swain's Motivating-Reaction Unit (MRU) sequencing, preserving your prose verbatim.
   • In Prose Diagnostics & Linting: AI-tell scans and rhythm diagnostics present bracketed choices ([AI-TELL: Cliché idiom. Option A: Cut. Option B: Physical action. Option C: Keep as author voice]). You hold the red pen; the AI never makes changes to get a "green checkmark."
4. The Writer's Room: An Inviolable Creative Sanctuary: Brainstorming and raw drafting happen in writers_room/ (notes/, beats/, drafts/, inputs/). Background linters and automated tests are strictly locked out by an Immunity Shield. Write as messy and raw as you want without being nagged by premature schemas or audit errors. When you decide a scene is ready, you graduate it to the formal manuscript pool.
5. Scale-Adaptive Complexity ("From Napkin to Universe"): Abstraction is a complexity valve, not a publishing contract. Soundingboard flexes dynamically across four progressive tiers:
   • Tier 0 (The Napkin): Frictionless writers_room/ sandbox with on-demand tools.
   • Tier 1 (The Atomic Story): Standalone novel production in stages/ with local canon.md (< 4,000 tokens).
   • Tier 2 (The Institutional Canvas): Multi-volume continuity in series/ for cross-book character states, romance ladders, and lore debt.
   • Tier 3 (The Cosmos Universe Canvas): Deep worldbuilding in world/ governed by world/CONTEXT.md across 6 ICM semantic domains (cosmology, chronology, geography, cultures, economy, factions) with Dynamic Context Isolation (< 6,000 tokens).
6. The 5 Foundational Principles of Authorial Sovereignty:
   • Authorial Truth is Absolute: An explicit author statement overrules all inferences, schemas, and prior drafts.
   • Explicit Uncertainty > Premature Precision: Flag ambiguities as open choices [Option A | Option B]; never invent synthetic facts to plug gaps.
   • Inference is Never Canon: Inferred lore remains quarantined with [unverified] until the author affirms it.
   • Dramatic Consequences are Invitations: Propose ripple effects and frictions as creative prompts, never as mandates.
   • Intentional Exceptions are Valid: Facts tagged [author exception] represent deliberate narrative sovereignty (miracles, anomalies, rule-breaks) and are never flagged as defects.
7. Creative History & Git as Evolution Layer (Playbook #21): Soundingboard files contain the meaning. Git records the evolution. Git is an open, non-proprietary historical layer over your file-first workspace—never a competing database. Checkpoints and pushes occur only when you say to. Malformed syntax is blocked to prevent repository corruption, while creative uncertainty (pacing, tells) remains completely unblocked.
8. No Black-Box Vector Databases: Built on the Interpretable Context Methodology (ICM, arXiv:2603.16021), your story's memory lives entirely in human-readable plain markdown files (canon.md, threads.md, preferences.md, world/). Open them in any text editor to see exactly what your assistant knows.

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Write Where You Want, How You Want

Soundingboard seamlessly accommodates your natural authorial habitat:

• Direct in the Project Folder (Obsidian, VS Code, iA Writer, Zed): Open the Soundingboard novel folder directly as an Obsidian Vault or local markdown workspace. Write your notes in writers_room/notes/ and your drafts in writers_room/drafts/. Soundingboard acts as the ambient operating system living quietly inside your vault.
• External Ingestion (Scrivener, Microsoft Word, Google Docs): Love writing in Scrivener or Word? Keep writing there. When you complete a draft, simply drop it into writers_room/inputs/ or run node scripts/soundingboard.js ingest <file>. The engine immutably archives your raw file, formats atomic scenes, and automatically harvests proper nouns into your canon ledger tagged [unverified].
• Author Collaboration Preferences (preferences.md): Right at your workspace root, a plain-text preferences.md profile lets you declare your working mode (solo, hybrid), primary editor, prose boundary (ai_prose_generation: "never"), and diagnostic tolerance. Edit it anytime; your AI partner immediately adapts.

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The 5 Creative Studio Workspaces

Soundingboard organizes novel production into five disciplined, author-paced workspaces:

1. 🛋️ The Discovery Lounge (Stage 01 · Onboarding)

A relaxed story and genre discovery interview. Your assistant helps you define your core premise, genre chassis, trope stack, and primary cast. It establishes your root preferences.md and creates an In-World Allowlist so unique in-universe terms aren't flagged as clichés.

2. 📋 The Storyboard Wall (Stage 02 · Planning)

Architect your story's spine without outlining paralysis. Map your 1-Page Foolscap Roadmap, track narrative subplots in threads.md, ledger obligatory genre scenes, and design scene cards with clear emotional value shifts (value_in ➔ value_out).

3. ✍️ The Writing Desk & Writer's Room (Stage 03 · Drafting)

Write freely in writers_room/ or draft against focused scene kits:

• The Ambient Desk Kit: Ask your agent for your scene briefing to get a tight 1-page summary of characters in the room, active secrets, sensory registers, and a same-POV voice anchor before you write.
• Scene Frontmatter Assistance (Playbook #19): Whenever you want, ask the AI to infer dramatic frontmatter from your prose, generate a scaffold with in-world suggestions, or talk through the turning point in chat.
• The Graduation Ceremony: When a draft is ready, graduate it into manuscript/scenes/sc-XXXX.md. It enters your canonical scene pool, safe and indexed, whether assigned to a chapter yet or floating freely.

4. 🔍 The Editorial Desk & Diagnostics (Stage 04 · Feedback)

An advisory diagnostic suite that respects human voice:

• Sub-500ms Scoped Audits: Instant scans for cadence variance, sensory balance, dialogue ratios, and synthetic tell-words.
• The Linter Bracket Workflow (Playbook #20): Diagnostic findings are framed as bracketed choices, never silent file edits.
• The Bracket Method for Developmental Editing (Playbook #18): Restructure cause-and-effect flow, tighten Coyne micro-beats, and fix Swain emotional sequencing while preserving your prose word-for-word.
• Thread Sentry & Visualizer: Detect dormant subplots and orphan scenes, and inspect interactive visual timelines via node scripts/soundingboard.js threads --view.
• Canon 2.0 & Spoiler Guard: Automatically flags orphaned facts and suppresses future story spoilers from early chapter continuity checks.

5. 🖨️ The Printing Press (Stage 05 · Publishing)

Assemble atomic scenes into chapter playlists (manuscript/chapters/ch-XX.md) with authored chapter break rationales. A single command compiles your book into publication-ready, typeset HTML and standard EPUB formats with configurable scene break dividers (***, blank space, or custom glyphs).

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Quickstart for Writers

You don't need programming experience or complex command-line setups:

1. Clone or download this repository to a folder on your computer.
2. Open the folder in Google Antigravity, Claude Code, Cursor, or your favorite agent harness.
3. Start the conversation in chat:

   "Read AGENTS.md and let's brainstorm my novel."

4. Your agent will read your preferences.md, adopt your preferred writing mode, and assist you at your pace.
5. Check for updates safely: Check for new craft modules and refined diagnostics anytime by asking your agent ("Check for Soundingboard updates") or running node scripts/soundingboard.js check-update. Updates automatically create timestamped safety snapshots in .soundingboard/backups/ and never touch your story files.

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Codified Narrative Craft: The 127-Module Library

Soundingboard equips your agent with 127 codified reference modules in _config/okf_craft/ synthesizing time-tested storytelling theory:

• The Story Grid (Shawn Coyne): Five Commandments of the scene quantum, value progression, and genre obligatories.
• The Anatomy of Story (John Truby): Moral arguments, designing principles, and 4-corner opposition webs.
• Sanderson's Laws of Magic: Hard vs. soft systems, costs, limitations, and escalating consequences.
• Character Arc Anatomy (K.M. Weiland): The Lie, the Wound, the Want vs. the Need, and transformative shift.
• Techniques of the Selling Writer (Dwight Swain): Motivation-Reaction Units (MRUs) for visceral pacing.
• Scale-Adaptive Architecture & Onomastics: Four complexity tiers ("Napkin to Universe"), phonotactic name generation, and deep worldbuilding across 6 ICM domains.
• Universal Narrative Rosetta Stone: Instant translation across Story Grid, Save the Cat!, Hero's Journey, and Story Circle vocabularies.

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Explore the Architecture & Methodology

For developers, technical authors, or curious creators who want to inspect the plumbing:

• 📖 The Science of Narrative Authenticity: The StoryScope research, why plain folders beat vector databases, and the Interpretable Context Methodology (ICM).
• 📜 Git Playbook & Creative History: How Git records the evolution of your file-first workspace, author checkpoint modes, and branch experiments.
• ⚙️ Technical Architecture & CLI Reference: The 2.0 flat scene pool architecture, scale-adaptive complexity tiers, 6 ICM world domains, and zero-dependency Node engine.
• 📚 Narrative Craft Encyclopedia & Rosetta Stone: Complete catalog of the 127 OKF craft cards, theory lineages, and symptom-based search.
• 🤝 Contributing Guide: Architectural invariants, zero-dependency requirements, and PR checklists.

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Inspiration & Dedication

Soundingboard stands on the shoulders of brilliant researchers, open-source pioneers, and a real-life creative partnership:

• For Axie: Dedicated with love to my partner, Axie, an author for whom I have served as a personal sounding board across years of late-night brainstorming, worldbuilding, and plot puzzles. Soundingboard was built from that exact creative rhythm—engineered so that AI can finally keep up with her boundless imagination the way a devoted human partner can.
• Jake Van Clief & David McDermott (ICM): Boundless credit for the foundational breakthrough of the Interpretable Context Methodology (ICM, arXiv:2603.16021). Their philosophy—that transparent, plain-text folder architectures and token-disciplined contracts beat black-box vector databases—provides the structural spine of this studio.
• Nous Research (autonovel): Gratitude to the team at Nous Research, whose early autonovel experiments proved that AI could tackle long-form fiction and inspired the quest to give writers a true, disciplined creative sounding board.

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License

MIT License. Designed with care for novelists, storytellers, and creative partners.