I wrote The Unseen Alliancewith Claude. Here's the plugin that held it together.

There is a specific way that novels written with LLMs fall apart, and it happens somewhere around chapter twenty. The model forgets that your spymaster lost two fingers eight chapters ago. It has the orc protagonist use a metaphor no orc would ever reach for. It slips a season between scenes. It gives a character a crown in a culture that has refused thrones for three thousand years. Once drift begins, every subsequent scene compounds it.

I hit this wall around chapter twenty of The Unseen Alliance — a fantasy about an orc war councillor, a goblin spymaster, and the alliance they build against human expansion while something older wakes up underneath them. The manuscript was eating itself alive.

So I stopped writing the book, and started writing the thing that would write the book. When the plugin was finished, the novel was a weekend's worth of runs away. I had both: claude-novel-plugin, and The Unseen Alliance, 50 chapters, shipped in hours of wall-clock time instead of the decade a manuscript like this would have taken by hand.

I'm not going to pretend I pushed a Claude-sized chunk of manuscript around until it sounded like me. The book is written with Claude — the prose, the dialogue, the scene-by-scene drafting. What I wrote was the outline, the cast, the rules of the world, and the opinions about what the book was for. The plugin did the rest. This post is about the plugin.

The real enemy is drift.

The bible is necessary but not sufficient. You also need a step in the pipeline whose only job is to check— to run the draft against the bible and the timeline, flag every contradiction, and refuse to let the scene through until they're resolved.

This is the single most important insight I arrived at. Generation and verification must be separate agents. The prose model is incentivised toward fluency; it will paper over small contradictions to keep the sentence moving. The continuity audit — Stage 5 of /novel-critique — has no such incentive. It reads with a clipboard and it is explicitly read-only: it never rewrites, only files anchors that the stage-6 reviser acts on.

The continuity agent's job is to be the most boring member of the team. It doesn't write. It doesn't suggest. It files flags.

One scene. Ten commands. Twenty-odd agents.

Every scene in The Unseen Alliance is produced by the same sequence of commands, wired into Claude Code as a plugin. The commands are narrow: /novel-outline holds the structure, /novel-character the cast, /novel-world the rules. /novel-validate runs three pre-writing stages in parallel — Narrative Architecture, Character Readiness, World Consistency — across nine validators (plot-hole detector, stakes auditor, pacing forecaster, arc completeness, voice profile auditor, relationship web, rule-system auditor, timeline feasibility, setting coverage). If any one is red, the draft is blocked.

Only then does /novel-write run. It dispatches a librarian (who loads only the context this one scene needs), a prose agent (who drafts 2,000-2,500 words), and stops. The draft goes into /novel-critique, which is five sequential stages — plot & structure, character development, prose quality, dialogue, continuity — and inside each stage, three Critics flag in parallel, three Judges vote in parallel, three Implementers rewrite in parallel. Stage 5 is the exception: continuity is read-only, and its flags promote to a dedicated revise-task.

That's the entire trick. Give each prompt a narrow job and a narrow view, and the whole system scales further than any single prompt ever could. Below is the pipeline as it ran for Chapter 49 — the signing of the Accord of Ashes, Skitter's last scene. Click through the stages, or press Play.

What this is, and isn't.

The book is written with Claude. I want to be plain about that. The sentences in The Unseen Alliance were drafted by an LLM in the same sense that a film is shot by a camera — the tool did the mechanical work, in hours of wall-clock time rather than the years a manuscript of this length would have taken by hand. What I brought was the outline, the cast, the rules of the world, the iteration on the plugin, and the opinions about what the book was for.

It's the same principle I lean on at work, translated into fiction: make some things easy and other things hard. The plugin makes drift hard. It makes continuity cheap. It makes the prose model choose between fluency and fact, and then it has nine validators standing behind it, and five critique stages in front of it, ready to say no.

If you want to try it

The plugin is on GitHub under MIT. It runs as a Claude Code plugin — install, point it at a vault and an outline, run /novel-init. The bible, validators, and pipeline above are lifted straight from the Unseen Alliancerun; they're what a real project looks like, not a demo.

If you're using it on your own book, I'd love to hear what breaks. That's how it got this good.