Grizzly
An open editor-in-a-skill for fiction writers — novelists, webnovel serial
authors, anyone with a manuscript. Editors are expensive. AI is cheap but writes
slop. Grizzly's bet: the value of AI for fiction is not generation, it is
diagnosis, structure, and memory. The author keeps the pen.
Why another AI writing tool
Every AI writing product fails writers the same way: it produces prose, the prose
has a voice, and the voice is the model's, not the author's. Grizzly inverts the
design:
- It never writes your book for you. Output is small, reviewable proposals: a
few lines, side-by-side fixes, named findings. Never an unsolicited rewrite.
- It diagnoses instead of generating. Findings with locations, severity tiers,
and honest verdicts. No praise padding.
- It remembers everything. An extractive card codex (chapters, arcs,
characters, threads) so a 200-chapter serial costs the same to work on as a
novella, and continuity errors get caught against recorded facts.
- It learns your voice, not the model's. Setup derives a voice spec from your
own passages; every suggestion anchors against it.
What it looks like in use
A surgical edit proposal (you accept, reject, or tweak each line):
Line 41 — emotion label.
- Mara felt the fear rise as the bell kept ringing.
+ The bell kept ringing. Mara counted the strokes.
A review finding:
[major] Ch 7, the cellar scene — buried landing. The chapter exists to
deliver the brother's betrayal, and it arrives in the flattest sentence of the
scene, mid-paragraph. The beat needs to land through a concrete moment, not a
summary. Routing: structure (grizzly-plan) or line work (grizzly-edit).
A cold-read audit verdict:
I'd keep reading. The cellar scene pulls, but I skimmed the market chapter
(no question raised for forty lines), and I cannot physically picture the
innkeeper — she is a voice in white space. Highest-leverage change: give the
market chapter one live thread.
How it works
flowchart LR
M[Your manuscript] -->|grizzly-cards| C[Codex<br/>chapters, arcs,<br/>characters, threads]
S[Your writing samples] -->|grizzly-init| V[VOICE.md<br/>your style spec]
C --> X{Modes}
V --> X
X -->|edit, review, audit| F[Findings + side-by-side fixes]
X -->|draft, plan, brainstorm| P[Small proposals, beat by beat]
F --> A((You decide))
P --> A
A -->|accepted changes| M
Three separated quality layers run under everything, because they fail
differently:
- Hygiene (the blacklist): catches AI tells — em dashes, "not X but Y",
emotion labels, cinematic filler.
- Delivery (the six checks): catches the opposite failure, the spotless flat
draft. Every scene needs the one place it lands.
- Architecture (the technique deck): 21 researched structural moves — false
peace, perspective fracture, hook rotation, escalation — with mechanisms and
failure modes.
Enforcement layer
The blacklist above is judgment. The enforcement layer is the part of it a
machine can check without judgment, run as a deterministic gate.
tools/tell-scan.ps1 is a regex scanner for the mechanically-detectable subset
of the blacklist: the em dash, the "too X to" construction, negative parallelism
("not X but Y", "nothing but", "without so much as"), and emotion or cognition
report-frames ("she felt", "he realized", "Mara noticed"). Run it on a chapter:
powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools/tell-scan.ps1 "chapters/ch07.md"
It accepts a single file or a *.md glob and prints one line per hit:
LEVEL file:line [rule] | matched snippet
Two tiers:
- HARD tells are unambiguous. Any HARD hit prints and the scanner exits 1
(so it can fail a commit hook or CI step).
- REVIEW tells have a higher false-positive rate (rule-of-three, "seemed",
cinematic-filler phrases). They print for human eyes but never fail the run.
The author's STANDARDS.md may relax or extend individual entries; the scanner
encodes only the defaults.
It is the floor, not the verdict
The scanner is the deterministic floor of the hygiene layer. It is paired with
two things regex cannot do: a separate-reader pass (re-read the draft cold,
against the full blacklist) and the delivery pass (decks/delivery-pass.md), for
everything mechanical detection cannot judge.
