Editorial Workbench

A side-by-side editor that runs your manuscript and your world through eight layers of review, with optional AI deep-passes when you want a second opinion. Premium tier feature.

Opening it

Go to /app/editor. Pick a project, optionally pick a world, and the Workbench opens. You can switch projects or worlds from the dropdowns in the header at any time. The dropdowns only show what you own.

The Workbench is a Premium tier feature. Free and Essentials users land on an upgrade page. If you’ve been a Premium subscriber in the past, you keep read-only access to anything you produced while you were on Premium — reports, diffs, and snapshots stay yours.

The eight layers

Each layer focuses on a different kind of editorial concern. Findings appear under the layer they belong to, so you can fix structure before sentences and sentences before commas without your attention bouncing.

  1. Overview. A composite health check across all the other layers. Diagnostic, not editorial — nothing to apply here.
  2. Story / Development. Plot, character, pacing, structure. The big-picture work.
  3. World Integrity. If your project is linked to a world: rules, timeline, magic systems, geography, religion, politics, economy, and the contradictions between them.
  4. Consistency. Continuity inside the manuscript: timeline conflicts, name spellings drifting, descriptions changing between scenes.
  5. Style / Voice. POV drift, tense slips, tone deviations from your declared voice print.
  6. Prose / Line. Sentence-level clarity, rhythm, repetition, awkward phrasings.
  7. Copy / Mechanics. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, formatting consistency.
  8. Publishing Readiness. Front and back matter, headings, scene breaks, and a final placeholder sweep before export.

The recommended order

You can work in any order, but most writers find this sequence makes the cleanup easier:

  1. Story / Development
  2. World Integrity
  3. Consistency
  4. Style / Voice
  5. Prose / Line
  6. Copy / Mechanics
  7. Publishing Readiness

The reason for the order: structural work makes prose work redundant if you skipped ahead. Polish a sentence in chapter 4 only to delete the chapter in a developmental pass and you’ve thrown the polish away. The Workbench surfaces this order as a hint strip at the top, but doesn’t enforce it.

Findings, patches, and AI

Every finding lands on a card in the right pane. The card has the detector that fired it, a one-line headline, a short body explaining why, and the evidence (a scene excerpt, an entity, a timestamp). For findings with a deterministic fix — double spaces, a stray smart quote, a name standardized to the canonical spelling — you’ll see an Apply patch button. Click it; the change goes in. If you change your mind, the snapshot system has your back.

For findings without a mechanical fix — “this scene’s pacing drags,” “the dialogue feels stilted” — click Engage AI editor. The AI uses your configured AI provider (Bring Your Own Key) and produces a rewrite suggestion you can accept or reject. AI passes are logged so you can see what they cost.

Story-World bridge

When your project is linked to a world, a separate engine catches contradictions across both. Examples: a scene timestamped before a character was established in the world; a magic action that breaks the rules of the magic system you defined; a scene transition that crosses two locations in less than a minute when your world has no fast-travel; a character’s name spelled differently in the Story Index than in the World Index. These are findings under the Consistency and World Integrity layers, marked as bridge findings.

Snapshots

Before any bulk apply or AI pass, the Workbench saves a snapshot of your project — scenes, story index, world entities. You can save snapshots manually too. Reverting is one click and rolls back the affected content.

AI-isms scrubber

More writers use AI to draft and edit, and the result tends to leave a trail. Certain words, phrases, and prose shapes show up in AI output far more often than in published fiction. Readers can tell. The AI-isms scrubber is a Premium pass that hunts those tells across your prose so you can rewrite them in your own voice.

The scrubber catches four families of tells. Vocabulary giveaways like delve, tapestry, robust, navigate, and harness. Phrase formulas like “it’s not just X, it’s Y,” “in today’s fast-paced world,” and “at its core.” Fiction-trope cliches like breath hitched, stomach dropped, a single tear rolled, blinked once, twice. And structural tells like em-dash overuse, the rhetorical “rule of three” comma triplet, and self-asked questions answered in the next sentence.

Each hit lands on a finding card the same way every other Workbench finding does. Some patterns carry safe replacement options. For those you can click Apply and the workbench swaps the offending word inside that one sentence. Others want more thought. Click Engage AI editor and the AI rewrites the line in your voice while keeping the meaning. Or click Mark intentionalif the “tell” was your choice and you want it left alone in this scene.

The scrubber is purely algorithmic, so running it costs nothing and produces no AI tokens until you choose to engage AI on a particular finding.

Read-only after downgrade

If you cancel Premium, you keep read access to every report, finding, diff, and snapshot you produced while you were a Premium subscriber. You can’t run new sessions or apply new patches until you re-subscribe, but the work you already paid for stays yours to read and reference.

Related