Novel Chapter Continuity Fix

The Problem It Solves

Long serial novels and episode-based drafts often break continuity across chapter files. A chapter may start with an event that never happened in the previous chapter, imply a conflict that was never established, or drift from the canonical place name, character state, role introduction, or relationship progress. The issue is harder to audit because problem terms may also appear in backup files or old drafts, making it easy to assume “this was already written earlier.”

How It Works

The skill turns continuity repair into a repeatable review loop:
- Use Read to locate the problematic sentence and pull the previous chapter ending.
- Use Grep to verify whether the event, person, place, or faction actually exists in the formal text.
- Decide the fix: rewrite the current chapter if the plot exists but is too distant, or remove or replace it if it has no setup.
- Re-run Grep to catch leftovers, and use Bash to check word count, adding planned content if needed.

It targets common failure modes such as inconsistent place names, inconsistent character states, unprepared new rivals or characters, and relationship progress contradictions. The output includes the corrected chapter, a revision report, and a work log so the reason for each change is traceable.

Boundaries

This skill is for fixing continuity in existing chapter files, not for expanding or rewriting an entire novel. It should distinguish formal revised files from backup or old drafts, and it should preserve core information by rewriting rather than deleting important plot points.