An agentic system for writing long-form genre fiction, themed as a cozy crime family.
The author hands the machine an arrangement (or a story seed, or a brain-dump). The machine plans the book — premise, structure, characters, world, outline, voice — pausing twice for the author to catch wrong turns. Then it drafts the book one piece at a time, fully autonomously, stopping only for problems serious enough to need a human. When the draft is done, the Cleanup Crew flags book-scale problems for the author to approve.
It's a sanctioned fork of Elizabeth Ann West's Novel Writing Machine v0.2. The donor's three-phase architecture is kept; the metaphor (F1 racing → cozy crime family), the autonomy model, the planning layer, series support, pen-name voice, and the editing roster are changed. The Family runs itself between sit-downs and only kicks the big calls upstairs to the Boss.
Decision fatigue is the enemy. When in doubt about whether something needs the author, it does not. — Operating constraint baked into the Boss
All the work before a single word of prose is written.
An arrangement comes in via one of three on-ramps. The machine builds eight planning artifacts: premise, beat sheet (against the named framework), scene outline, character interiority, world + the Books, style sheet, conflict map, dialogue cards. The author ratifies twice — once after the foundation, once after the blueprint.
One piece at a time, strict outline order, halt only on real breaks.
The Wheelman runs the seven-step loop on every piece. The Crew (Fixer / Bookkeeper / Earpiece) preps in parallel. The Consiglieres audit. The Boss applies the severity ladder. Sit-downs settle on the Boss's own authority. Only "Do it over" and "Kick it upstairs" halt. The one mid-draft creative call surfaced to the author is off-script = discovery (a discovery nod).
Six inspectors catch book-scale problems no single-piece reader can see.
The Closer (manuscript-scope craft), the Wire (rhythm), the Tail (crutch frequency + the author's editing roster), the Alibi (pacing-vs-plan), the Cold Read (engagement), the Payoff (promises kept). All flag candidates to one file; the author ratifies per flag. voice-preservation runs as the do-not-cut counterweight. For series books, propose-at-close drafts bible updates. Final pass: proofreader.
Per §12 of the spec — these are the only times the machine kicks something upstairs to the author. Everything else runs autonomously.
Approve or correct the arrangement (and, for series books, the auto-seeded fields from the bible's Read-at-Open). As of 2026-05-24: if the book's heat_level falls outside the pen-name heat_band (or the four other band-mismatch conditions trigger), the Boss surfaces the KICKBACK before the nod as a Family matter — author resolves before review proceeds. See Section 14.
Premise + structure + characters before the rest of planning. If wrong here, everything downstream is wrong.
World, Books, outline, voice anchor, conflict map, dialogue cards. The donor's "scrutineering" gate. Author signs off; the Setup closes.
The one mid-draft creative call — only fires when the prose discovers something better than the outline planned. Series-impact discoveries ride this nod too.
Cleanup ratification — the author works through every flag. Accept / reject / revise. Series-bible propose-at-close ratifies here too if applicable.
The single most important behavior rule in the fork. It's what buys back the author's evenings.
| Severity | Mafia term | What the Boss does | Halts the Run? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Note | Logged in the Books / job-log. Continue. | No |
| 2 | Word | Queued for next checkpoint. Piece counts provisionally. Continue. | No |
| 3 | Sit-down | Boss settles on his own authority. Makes the call, applies it, logs it. Continue. | No |
| 4 | Do it over | Piece was wrong; redraft with the issue as a constraint. Old draft discarded (saved to the Paper Trail). | Yes |
| 5 | Kick it upstairs | Structural problem. Back to the Setup; fix the planning artifact; resume from the affected piece. | Yes |
Orchestrates every phase. The only role that makes calls against the §3 ladder. Forked from the donor's team-principal.
Three modes that all converge on a filled the-arrangement.md: filled / Seedsmith seed / brain-dump conversation.
Resolves who belongs to whom — the pen-name → series → book hierarchy. Reports any folder/arrangement mismatch.
Owns the modular series bible. Read-at-open auto-seeds new books; propose-at-close drafts bible updates for ratification.
Loads the framework named in the arrangement (RtB full + three stubs). Plans beats against the book's length target.
Multi-thread map of internal/interpersonal/external/structural conflicts, their escalation, and where each resolves.
One card per major character. Voice fingerprint, tells, taboos, stress voice, intimate voice. Read by the Wheelman; audited by the Family Consigliere.
The Family's books. Knowledge state ("who knows what"), location, relationship, prop, timeline. Series canon loads here for series books.
Drafts one piece at a time via the seven-step loop. Honors the outline, the Books, and the pen name's voice.
Generates a tight interiority card when a minor character gains page time mid-Job.
The only role with write access to the dynamic half of the Books. Validates every write; saves pre-update Books to evidence.
Captures emergent ideas the Wheelman throws off. Series-impact tags ride to the Sidethought Log for propose-at-close.
Four jurisdictions on every finished piece — Bookkeeper's (continuity + series canon), Voice (with voice-bleed guard), Family (character truth), Rhythm (pace).
Wraps craft-editor at book scope. Pre-runs voice-preservation. Routes every other inspector's ratified rewrites through craft-editor.
Sentence rhythm + opener variety across chapters. Calibrated to this pen name's voice anchor.
Crutch-list frequency/density + orchestrates the author's five editing skills + voice-preservation as do-not-cut counterweight.
Tension + word counts vs. the plan. Drag zones, runaway zones, thread-cadence misses.
Sequential first-read engagement curve. Confused / bored / hooked / moved / suspicious — the curve matters more than any single moment.
Broken promises, orphan payoffs, partial landings. Cross-references the Cold Read's engagement at planned landings.
Every real run leaves a timestamped folder on disk — prompts, outputs, calls, ratifications, saved artifacts. Nothing the machine does is invisible.
If .mock-mode exists at project root, every model call is replaced with placeholder content. Prove the wiring works before spending a cent.
Copied into the project so the Backroom doesn't depend on which plugins are loaded that day. Six measure-and-propose under the Tail; one is the counterweight; the rest fill specific gaps.
AI-tell words and metaphor patterns.
Em-dash overuse vs. the pen name's policy.
Repeated descriptors / phrases / structures at book scale.
Register inflation and cognitive-shortcut language.
Filler, hedging, weak constructions.
Pre-runs against the manuscript before any cuts surface. Demotes overlapping candidates to a Note so signature voice isn't trimmed by mistake.
Reads + proposes updates to dialogue-cards. Feeds and is fed by the cards.
Generates story seeds via trope-stacking; on-ramp 2 maps the seed semantically into the arrangement.
Authors a voice bible from scratch for a brand-new pen name with no books and no existing guide.
Pre-publication polish for typos, punctuation, formatting. The very last step.
Pen-name-aware — loads audience-profile.md at the pen-name level and channels that avatar.
Multi-book series design when starting brand-new. The bible captures the result; this skill helps do the design.
From Elizabeth Ann West's Novel Writing Machine v0.2. Reused as-is or with the metaphor renamed (one rename: world-engineer → the Books).
The seven-step drafting loop the Wheelman runs.
The one craft authority — called in three scopes (in-loop, Consigliere audit, Cleanup).
Off-screen backstory, body memory, fears with origins for every major character.
The 17-section dossier, scene outline, payoffs, tension curve, the take.
The cascading 17-section worksheet engine that story-engineer wraps.
Deterministic word-count checks. Used by the Alibi at Cleanup.
Pulls cast names from period/region-appropriate pools, anti-AI-cluster filtered.
Extracts the empirical voice anchor from finished books. Refines the day-one Voice Bible.
Was world-engineer. Mafia-renamed; mechanics unchanged. Plus a new Series Canon section.
Voice lives at the pen-name level and is inherited by every book under that pen name. There is no per-book voice override.
PEN NAME — voice identity (voice bible, style guide, voice anchor, crutch list, ick list, prose rules, audience profile) — optionally: heat band + spice/ subfolder (Spice Style Sheet, AI Context Block, Dialogue Flavor Palette, Kink & Setting Roulette) built per the activation tier — see Section 14 └─ SERIES — story-world identity (world, recurring cast, meta-arc, series canon) [OPTIONAL] └─ BOOK — the work (the-arrangement, planning stack, manuscript, the Books, runs/)
A standalone book skips the Series level but still names a pen name. A series belongs to exactly one pen name. The folder location is the ground truth; the arrangement's identity fields point into it (§6.5).
templates/the-arrangement.md — the entry-point file per book (now carries romance_arc, numeric 0–5 heat_level, and core_dynamic per the 2026-05-24 schema update)templates/series/series-bible.md — the modular series bibletemplates/pen-name/ — eight pen-name-level files (was seven; ick-list.md added 2026-05-24):
pen-name-profile.md — the identity card (now carries optional heat_band)voice-bible.md — author-provided source of voice intentstyle-guide.md — author-provided style rulesvoice-anchor.md — empirical voice (Style Auditor fills)crutch-list.md — patterns to avoidick-list.md — NEW — banned intimate vocabulary; sister to crutch-list at the voice layer; always built (acts as blanket "no sexual language" guardrail for non-romance pens)prose-rules.md — POV/tense habits, signature movesaudience-profile.md — ideal reader avatar for this pen nametemplates/pen-name/spice/ — NEW — four spice-layer templates, copied into a pen-name's spice/ folder per the activation tier:
spice-style-sheet.md — brand handbook for intimate scenes (activation ≥ light)ai-context-block.md — reusable prompt header composed from style sheet + ick list + voice bible (activation ≥ light)dialogue-flavor-palette.md — the brand's flavor menu fed to per-character dialogue cards (activation ≥ light)kink-setting-roulette.md — anti-default engine; setting + kink menus (activation = full only — band ceiling 4–5)frameworks/romancing-the-beat.md — full worked example. Gwen Hayes's framework, 19 beats across 4 movements.frameworks/5-act.md — stub. Classical five-act structure.frameworks/demystifying-the-beats.md — stub. Susan May Warren's lie/wound → truth framework.frameworks/lester-dent.md — stub. The pulp 6,000-word master formula.the-pedigree/scripts/resolve_identity.py — walks the hierarchy, returns resolved paths and any folder/arrangement mismatches.the-books/scripts/ledger_validate.py — validates the Books' schema. Windows-cp1252 fix applied.the-books/scripts/ledger_query.py — character-and-time-scoped knowledge slice for the Wheelman.chapter-word-counter/scripts/analyze_chapter.py — deterministic per-piece word count.D:\code\the-backroom\ ├── FAMILY-MACHINE-build-spec.md # the spec, source of truth ├── STEP-2-claude-code-handoff.md # your handoff guide ├── BUILD-REVIEW.html # this file ├── .mock-mode # exists when mock mode is ON (currently absent) ├── .claude/ │ └── skills/ # 41 SKILL.md files — the machine ├── pen-names/ # your real work lives here │ └── README.md # the identity-tree readme ├── templates/ # 14 templates the Boss copies per book / per pen name │ ├── the-arrangement.md # carries romance_arc + heat_level (0-5) + core_dynamic │ ├── pen-name/ # 8 pen-name-level files (ick-list added 2026-05-24) │ │ └── spice/ # NEW — 4 spice templates, copied per activation tier │ └── series/series-bible.md ├── frameworks/ # 4 beat-framework recipe cards │ ├── romancing-the-beat.md # full │ ├── 5-act.md # stub │ ├── demystifying-the-beats.md # stub │ └── lester-dent.md # stub └── novel-machine-v2-claude-execute-build-spec/ # donor, read-only reference
audience-profile.md added with the audience-audit wiring; ick-list.md added 2026-05-24 with the Heat & Intimacy subsystem — see Section 14.)D:\code\the-backroom\. Tell it: "I want to start a new book." The Boss takes it from there.spice/ subfolder conditional on band ceiling ≥ 2)..mock-mode at project root, walk through one full piece end-to-end, watch what files write where and how the gates surface. Then delete the flag.The first run surfaced a real bug: heat was being silently inferred from a pen-name default rather than asked. The fix is bigger than "ask the question" — heat sits inside a tiered system gated by whether the book even has a romance arc, validated against a brand-promise band the pen name commits to, and activating a six-artifact apparatus in proportion to that band's ceiling.
Full visual reference: HEAT-AND-INTIMACY.html — the 0–5 scale, the four activation tiers, the four KICKBACK conditions, the six artifacts, and the disk layout. Built as a sibling document to this Build Review.
Arrangement template gained romance_arc, numeric 0–5 heat_level, core_dynamic. Pen-name profile carries optional heat_band. NEW: ick-list.md at the voice layer.
All three on-ramps ask romance_arc first; heat only when applicable; band validation enforced; the Boss surfaces KICKBACKs before Intake review as Family matters.
Intake-heat-level memory rewritten for the new scope. SPICE-SUBSYSTEM-design-notes.md updated with the per-phase Review log.
Four spice templates under templates/pen-name/spice/. Ick List copied into both pen folders. Spice templates copied into mafia/spice/ (band 4–5 = full activation). Boss Case C auto-creates conditional spice/ for new pens.
The runtime layer routing spicy scenes through spice-draft + scene-audit; dialogue-cards reading the new palette; Voice Consigliere reading the Ick List; per-scene heat on the outline. Waits for the first romance book to be in the Job phase — wires against a real scene, not air.
ick-list.md at voice layer; 4 new templates under spice/).romance_arc, core_dynamic, and numeric 0–5 heat_level; pen-name profile's free-text default_heat_level replaced with optional heat_band.intake-on-ramps): all three on-ramps updated; romance_arc asked first; heat gated; semantic-mapping table carries old→new scale translation for back-compat.spice/ subfolder; the Intake Nod step gains KICKBACK handling before the nod.mafia → heat_band: 4-5 (full activation); test-pen → heat_band removed (non-romance pen).romance_arc and core_dynamic (the dynamic drafted from existing content, marked for author confirmation); the GUI handoff spec gained the new form fields and KICKBACK alert state.The intake conversation will feel different from the first run: "Does this pen name write romance?" comes before any heat question; the heat ask is on a numeric 0–5 scale; the Boss validates against the pen-name band immediately and refuses to proceed with an out-of-band commitment. The mafia pen is already configured at heat_band: 4-5 with the spice templates in place — populate them from the "Talk Dirty to Me, Claude" course materials before the first book reaches Setup, and the apparatus will be ready when the Wheelman starts drafting.