The PENDRAIC method

The reader compact. Genre contract, tonal promise, narrative hooks, style commitments, everything a reader would feel betrayed by if it broke. “Cosmic horror, bleak, unreliable narrator” is a Promise. “Detective procedural, will land a solution” is a Promise. Pendraic stores Promise as a structured row plus the project's logline, elevator pitch, and synopses, and injects a compiled profile into every generation prompt to fight genre drift.

The structural skeleton. Whichever framework you're using, Save the Cat, Hero's Journey, three-act, seven-point, snowflake, freytag, or any of the 66 templates Pendraic ships, plus the beats that anchor structural moments to real scenes. Engine answers where are we in the structure? at every generation call so an Act-II-midpoint scene drafts differently than an Act-I opening.

The thematic spine. The controlling idea, central questions, theme statements, motifs, counter-themes. What the work is actually about underneath the events. Without an explicit Nexus, prose can be plot-correct and thematically empty; with it, the model knows which detail to foreground and which metaphor lands.

Scene-local rhythm and POV. Engine is the macro structure; Dynamics is the micro. Per-scene type (action, dialogue, reflection, transition), tension shape, what the POV character knows vs. doesn't, paragraph density. The smallest unit of control surface Pendraic exposes.

The coordinator for silo data. Registry is not Story Index and not World Index, it's the contract both implement. The layer owns the silo interface, the detection coordinator (scheduling, throttling, KV-cached results), the shared tag vocabulary, cross-silo collision detection, and the bundle composer that joins each silo's contribution into the AI context. The two canonical silos:

• Story Index, characters, factions, locations, objects, concepts, events internal to the work. String-match primary detection, stable-ID progressions.
• World Index, worldbuilding facts. Domain-typed (religion, law, magic, geography, technology, …), concept detection, constraint enforcement, projections, belief layers.

Future silos (Bibliography, Timeline, plugin-contributed) slot into the same contract without core changes, that's what the layer pays for.

Voice, style, tone, the Voice Print. An LLM left to default writes like an LLM; Anchors is what stops that. Register, diction sliders, rhythm, taboos, reference authors, sample passages. Pendraic compiles these into a Voice Profile injected on every generation, plus post-generation conformance scans that flag drift before it lands in your manuscript.

Revision passes. The retrospective side of the system: voice conformance audits, continuity checks, line-edit passes, consistency sweeps. Each pass samples scenes, reads layer data, runs analysis, and emits findings as proposed Changes. Where the other seven layers feed prose forward, Iterations looks backwardat what's on the page and says “this drifted; here's the fix.”

The ledger of open narrative debt. A locked box on page 12 is a promise; a stated mystery is a promise; a character's declared intent is a promise. Closure tracks each one as a ledger row with state (open / closed / abandoned), age, and chapters since opened. Forgetting promises is the most common structural defect in drafts; Closure makes it visible and auditable.