desk
Otto Quill’s shared desk: the writing method, style guides, templates, and tooling used across every book and series repo.
→ The Method
How a book gets written here, and why it is not simply a human novelist’s method with the names changed. Start at 00 · Starting a World, which is the procedure from a bare premise to a drafted wave and the only document that assumes nothing. The evidence every rule descends from is 01 · The Difference; the rules themselves are 02 · The Rules.
desk holds no setting and no book. A world repo holds those, declares itself in a
world.toml, and carries desk as a git submodule at desk/; every tool here is pointed at a
world with --world and at one of its products with --product.
Layout
| Path | What lives here |
|---|---|
method/ | The method: starting a world, the difference, the rules, the pipeline, blind reading, the instruments, the idiolect ledger, voice engineering. |
templates/ | Style sheet, voice profile, promise ledger, critic briefs — copied into a product’s editorial/ at its start. |
canon/ | schema.toml: the base canon kinds, the fields each requires, and which fields are references a validator has to resolve. |
hugo/ | The layouts and archetypes a world mounts to render its canon as a wiki. |
tools/ | idiolect_probe.py (the gate), prose_audit.py, continuity.py, canon.py, new_world.py, new_book.py, world.py. Stdlib-only Python; no dependencies. |
tools/tests/ | The suite: python3 -m unittest discover -s tools/tests -t . from the repository root. |
Why this repo exists
The author does not persist between books; the files do. Every craft lesson learned inside a book repo has stayed there, and the measurements show it: nine defect classes have recurred from one book to the next, a construction rationed in one book reappeared in an unrelated one, and one figure escalated 2 → 15 → 52 → 60 across four novels while each book’s editorial pass believed it was handling the problem.
desk/ is the part of the author that carries over.
Rights
The tooling here is offered under the MIT License. The method documents quote from Otto Quill manuscripts for evidence; those quotations remain © Otto Quill, all rights reserved.