The Family Machine — an agentic system for writing genre fiction, run like a (cozy) crime family.
You bring it an arrangement. The Family plans the book, pausing twice so you can catch a wrong turn. Then it drafts the book one piece at a time, on its own, only kicking the big calls upstairs to you. When the draft is done, the Cleanup Crew flags the book-scale problems for you to approve.
Forked fromElizabeth Ann West · Novel Writing Machine v0.2
ThemeCrime family — cozy, not operatic (was F1)
Built forOne author · many pen names · many genres
Three phases. Each one a gate the work passes through.
A book moves through three phases: planning the work, doing the work, and cleaning up after. Each phase has a clear exit and a clear escalation path. Two units travel through the whole system: a piece is one scene, worked end to end. A Run is a chapter, a continuous run of pieces.
The dashed amber path is the one most pipelines miss: when the prose finds something better than the plan, it gets kicked upstairs — with your sign-off.
02 · The autonomy spine
Five severity levels. Only the top two can stop the Family.
This is the rule that buys back your evenings. Most things get logged or settled by the Boss; the machine only halts for the serious calls.
CHANGE — halt line raised to "Do it over"+
Level
What happens
Halts?
Note
Logged in the books. Piece counts. Continue.
No
Word
Queued for review at the next checkpoint. Continue.
No
Sit-down
The Boss settles it himself — makes the call, applies it, logs it, continues. CHANGE
No
Do it over
The piece was wrong; redo it with the issue as a constraint. Old draft discarded.
Yes
Kick it upstairs
Structural problem → back to the Setup, fix the plan, resume from the affected piece.
Yes
No permission pings. The machine never asks "shall I continue?" or "done with this piece, move on?" Those check-ins were your #1 source of friction last time. The answer is always yes until a "Do it over" or "Kick it upstairs" says otherwise.
Why a Sit-down doesn't stop the Family.The Boss convenes the sit-down and settles it on his own authority. Only kicks it upstairs when it's a Family matter. He makes the best call, logs it, and the Run keeps moving — preserving the low-friction design you forked the system to get.
How it drafts, and what a halt looks like CHANGE
The machine drafts pieces strictly in order within a Run — it never drafts past an unresolved blocker, because pieces are causally chained (piece 14's resolution can change what piece 15 even is). When a "Do it over" or "Kick it upstairs" fires and you're away, the run freezes completely. Nothing happens behind your back; you return to a clean state with a short queue of decisions.
Backed by the donor's own finding: several inspectors return false signals on a half-written book, so there's little safe work to do mid-draft anyway. Total freeze is both the simplest model and the most correct.
03 · Who the book belongs to
Three levels of identity. Voice is baked into where the book lives.
NEW — the donor handles one standalone book
You write many series across many genres under many pen names. The fork stacks three levels, each inheriting from the one above. Because voice lives at the top, "which voice am I writing in" is never a question you can forget to answer — it's structural.
Pen name always. Series optional. Book always. A standalone attaches straight to its pen name.
04 · Phase 1 — The Setup
Planning. The machine writes it; you read it and push back.
You did this by hand last time — that was you doing the machine's job. Now it generates the plan and stops twice for you to catch drift early, where a wrong turn is cheap to fix.
Three ways to start a book CHANGE
Pick the on-ramp per book, depending on how formed the idea is that day. All three converge on one filled the-arrangement.md.
on-ramp 1
Filled arrangement
You fill the form. For a series book, the machine pre-fills most of it from the bible.
on-ramp 2
Story-seed first
Run your Seedsmith tool, drop the seed in. Format-agnostic — Seedsmith's shape varies by genre, so the machine maps meaning, not fixed fields.
on-ramp 3
Brain-dump
Talk at it free-form; it interviews back and drafts the arrangement for you to approve. Elizabeth's own preferred kickoff.
The planning stack — eight artifacts CHANGE
Premise
sharpened hook + themes
Beat Sheet / Structure
built against the named framework
Scene Outline
the piece list, scene by scene
Character Profiles
with off-screen interiority KEEP
Worldbuilding + the Books
incl. the knowledge-state engine KEEP
Style sheet
pen-name voice anchor + crutch list
Conflict Map
explicit escalation, kept visible
Dialogue cards
per-character voice, distinct cast
Dropped from your old stack: the Codex (absorbed into the Books) and the standalone Drafting toolkit (its craft prompts live inside the editing skills).
Swappable beat frameworks NEW
Romance, cozy mystery, and pulp mystery structure differently. One dossier method would flatten them. Each framework is a small reference file the structure step loads — you name it in the arrangement (structure_framework), and you add new ones over time without rebuilding the machine.
v1 build: the swappable machinery + one fully-authored framework — Romancing the Beat (your first book through the machine is a romance). 5-Act, Demystifying the Beats, and Lester Dent ship as stubs, fleshed out against real books.
Two planning gates CHANGE
1
Foundation. After premise + structure + character profiles. If this is wrong, everything downstream is wrong. You review and correct.
2
Blueprint. After world + the Books + scene outline + style sheet + conflict map + dialogue cards. You review and sign off. Drafting begins.
Why two gates and not the donor's one: planning is the one place you want a little friction — a page-one misread compounds through the whole stack and costs a full re-read at the end. The opposite of drafting, where you want near-silence.
05 · Phase 2 — The Job
Each piece is drafted, prepped, and audited.
Three things act on every piece: the drafting loop, the parallel Crew, and the per-piece Consigliere audit. The Boss makes the call on every flag.
The drafting loop — 7 steps, run by the Wheelman KEEP
Gather → Plan → Draft → Repetition → Continuity → Craft → Final
the Crew KEEP
the Fixer — interiority for minor characters who gain page time
the Bookkeeper — the only role that writes to the Books
the Earpiece — captures stray ideas for future pieces
the Consiglieres KEEP
Bookkeeper's Consigliere — continuity + series canon
Voice Consigliere — voice; also the voice-bleed guard
Family Consigliere — character truth vs. interiority
Rhythm Consigliere — tension curve + word targets
The Consiglieres flag with severity; they never rewrite. The Boss consolidates and calls it against the ladder in section 02.
The Books — the knowledge-state engine KEEP — and the heart of the fit Every fact carries known_to and known_since. Before drafting a piece, the machine asks "what does this character know as of piece N?" and writes only from that slice — so a character can't reference something they haven't learned yet. The donor calls this the single most important piece of machinery. For mafia romance and mystery it's a gift: secrets, betrayals, and reveal timing all run on who-knows-what-and-since-when.
06 · Phase 3 — The Cleanup
Six inspectors catch what only shows up at book scale.
No inspector edits the manuscript. Each flags candidates with reframes; you ratify what applies.
Inspector
Job
the Closer
The primary book-wide craft sweep — the one craft authority, applied to the whole manuscript
the WireCHANGE
Sentence rhythm + opener variety — listening to cadence
the TailNEW roster
Crutch frequency book-wide + your signature editing skills
the Alibi
Actual tension + word counts vs. the target curve; does the timeline hold up
the Cold Read
Sequential first-read engagement curve
the Payoff
Every setup pays off; every payoff has its setup; promises kept
Your editing skills — the measurement layer NEW
Your pattern-signature skills slot in under the Tail, not as rivals to the craft judgment. They measure and propose; the one craft authority (the Closer) does the rewriting; nothing auto-applies; you ratify per flag.
ai-flag-vocabulary
AI-tell words & metaphors
em-dash-converter
em-dash overuse
repetition-tracker
repeated descriptors
register-precision
register inflation
prose-tightening
filler & hedging
voice-preservation
the counterweight — reviews proposed cuts and pre-flags "keep this, it's voice"
Why nothing auto-applies, even "obvious" fixes: an em-dash or an AI-flag word is sometimes intentional voice. Auto-applying would route around voice-preservation — the one guardrail built to protect your voice. So ratifying everything isn't busywork; it's what keeps that guardrail meaningful.
07 · Where you stay
Five moments need you — the Family matters. Everything else runs on its own.
1
Intake review — approve/correct the arrangement (and, for series, the auto-seeded fields).
2
Foundation gate — premise/structure/characters before the rest of planning.
3
Blueprint sign-off — world/outline/voice before drafting (= the donor's scrutineering; naming lock-in folds in here).
4
Drift = discovery — the one mid-draft creative call.
5
The Cleanup ratification — flags + (if series) the propose-at-close bible update.
The workflow this enables: ratify the planning in an evening, give the word, walk away. The machine drafts in order, the Consiglieres flag, the Boss handles everything below "Do it over." You return to new pieces in the right voice, the books showing every call, and a short queue of only the Family matters that truly needed you.
08 · Series support
A modular bible that serves four kinds of series.
NEW — the donor has no series concept
A series only fills the bible sections its type needs. The bible is read at open (auto-seeds the new book's arrangement and plan) and proposed at close (the machine drafts the updates; you ratify). No new gates — it reuses intake review and final sign-off.
Recurring cast + world
same family/town across books
Ongoing meta-arc
a slow-burn arc across books
Shared-world standalone
new leads, shared world only
Interconnected standalones
new couple per book, shared world
Series canon loads into the same continuity guard that protects within-book facts. Series-affecting discoveries ride the existing drift-as-discovery gate, tagged "series impact." Reuse, not new machinery.
09 · Unfinished Business
A future mode for finishing shelved manuscripts.
Not built in v1 — but the architecture must not preclude it. Unfinished Business picks up an old job that never got closed out: the entry point is a partial draft instead of an arrangement, and a forensic read of what's already there reconstructs the planning artifacts backward before The Job phase can run.
The one v1 requirement so it stays possible: the planning artifacts and the Books must be buildable from existing prose, not only from an arrangement. Keep artifact-generation decoupled from the intake source.
Forked from Elizabeth Ann West's Novel Writing Machine v0.2, with her endorsement. The mafia theme, autonomy model, planning layer, series support, pen-name hierarchy, and editing roster are the author's own.