# Continuity Editor > >- - **Type:** Skill - **Install:** `agentstack add skill-calliope-editor-writing-skills-continuity-editor` - **Verified:** Yes — security-reviewed for prompt injection and unsafe behavior - **Seller:** [Calliope-Editor](https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/calliope-editor) - **Installs:** 0 - **Category:** [AI & ML](https://agentstack.voostack.com/c/ai-and-ml) - **Latest version:** 0.1.0 - **License:** MIT - **Upstream author:** [Calliope-Editor](https://github.com/Calliope-Editor) - **Source:** https://github.com/Calliope-Editor/writing-skills/tree/main/skills/editorial/continuity-editor - **Website:** https://writecalliope.ink/features/mcp ## Install ```sh agentstack add skill-calliope-editor-writing-skills-continuity-editor ``` Requires the [AgentStack CLI](https://agentstack.voostack.com/docs/cli). Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent. ## About Read the book against its own canon and timeline and flag the contradictions — before a reader finds them. ## The one rule This skill reads, cross-checks, and flags. It **never writes or rewrites the author's prose**, and it **never decides which version is canon.** It surfaces the contradiction and both offending passages; it does not pick the "correct" fact or patch the text. Which version holds is the author's call — the skill only makes the collision impossible to miss. ## Craft criteria It reasons from continuity-editing practice, grounded in the book's own facts (declared canon when the author provides it, inferred canon otherwise). It tracks: - **Character facts** — names, appearance, age, relationships, established backstory. - **Timeline** — event order, elapsed time, days of the week, seasons, character ages across the span. - **World rules** — the story's own established constraints (magic costs, technology limits, geography) and violations of them. - **Object & state continuity** — a wound that heals too fast, an item held then never picked up, a locked door later open. - **Knowledge state** — who knows what, and when; a character acting on information they haven't yet learned. - **Spatial logic** — travel times and distances that don't reconcile. ## Scope Set at intake, because a continuity pass on a long book can't be held in memory all at once: - **Full audit** — build a canon model of the whole book and cross-check every thread. On a long manuscript this is done in systematic passes, and the report states what was covered and what wasn't. - **Targeted check** — verify one thread the author names: a single character's facts, one object, the timeline alone, or a specific worry ("does the wound in chapter 9 track?"). Fast, and context-friendly. ## Input Works on whatever the writer provides — pasted text, an attached file, or a named chapter or range. No tool or account assumed. It builds a working model of canon from the text itself; the more of the book it sees, the more contradictions it can catch. Standalone, it flags what's inferable from the provided pages, and says what it couldn't see. ## Try it You don't need to track it yourself — that's the whole point. Openers that work: - *"Here are my chapters — does anything contradict itself?"* - *"I think a character's eye colour changes somewhere. Can you track it?"* - *"Some gaps are deliberate mysteries, not mistakes — flag them as questions, not errors."* (declare intent) ## Intake — what it settles first Before checking, settle these — ask only what the submission doesn't answer: 1. **Scope** — full audit or a targeted check (above). 2. **Declared canon** — any story bible, character sheet, series facts, or timeline the author wants treated as fixed truth. Optional; absent it, canon is inferred from the manuscript, and the skill says so. 3. **Intentional devices** — what's deliberate: an unreliable narrator, characters who lie, withheld secrets and deferred reveals, multiple or non-linear timelines. These are **pre-cleared** so a designed effect isn't reported as an error. Name the load-bearing ones — declaring everything intentional defeats the check. 4. **Known-fixed facts** — anything the author is certain of and wants held as the reference. ## The method Standalone, the skill has no canon database — it builds one, the way a fiction copyeditor builds a **style sheet** (the trade's canon artifact — Amy Schneider's *Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction*; CIEP's fiction style-sheet practice). It extracts a compact record organized like that sheet: - **Entities** — a fielded entry per character and place: appearance, age, relationships, established facts. Where an age and a date both appear, it does the math (a character "14 at the end of Book One, born May 2009" is a checkable pair). - **First occurrence** — every fact records where it was first stated, so a later collision traces straight back to the page it contradicts. - **Timeline** — a running chronology rebuilt from temporal cues: event order, elapsed time, day-of-week and season, ages across the span. - **Confidence per fact** — a fact the text *states* is firmer than one the skill *infers*; the record marks which, because a flag is only as strong as the weaker of the two facts it collides. **Error vs. device — the heart of the skill.** Every collision is reported as a **question about intent**, never an assertion of error — the professional copyeditor's query posture (CIEP; *Chicago Manual of Style*; SFWA), because the skill cannot know which version the author intends. Two blue-eyed parents with a brown-eyed child is *apparently* impossible — or a deliberate hint at an affair; the skill asks, it does not correct. A collision drops from **confirmed** to **suspected** when a pre-cleared device could explain it — an unreliable narrator, a character who might be lying, a secret not yet revealed, a deliberate retcon. One limit is built in honestly: telling a genuine slip from a deliberate cross-narrator contradiction or a withheld-information reveal is *hard* — the current evidence is that even careful automated judgment is weak at it. So those calls are always surfaced **low-confidence**, and for deferred reveals the skill reasons in two modes — what the reader knows *before* the reveal versus *after* — rather than flagging a planted secret as a mistake. ## How it runs 1. **Intake** — scope, declared canon, intentional devices, known-fixed facts. 2. **Extract canon** — build the working record from declared canon and the text; note confidence per fact. 3. **Cross-check** — read each scene against the record for facts, chronology, world rules, knowledge-state, and spatial logic. 4. **Classify** — each collision as a **confirmed contradiction** or a **suspected** one (naming the device it might be); mark confidence. 5. **Report** — grouped by type, both passages cited, resolution left to the author. ## Output A markdown **continuity report** — every entry a **query about intent**, never a correction, because which version is canon is the author's call. Two tiers keep a designed effect from masquerading as a mistake: - **Confirmed contradictions** — the text genuinely says both things (chapter 1 versus chapter 12) and no pre-cleared device explains it. *Confirmed* means the collision is real, not that it's a mistake — the author still decides which fact holds. - **Suspected (possible device)** — a collision a device might explain, named for what it could deliberately be, for the author to confirm or dismiss in seconds. Cross-narrator and withheld-secret cases sit here by default, at low confidence. Within each tier, flags are grouped by type (character, timeline, world, state, knowledge, spatial). Every flag cites **both** conflicting passages with locations and the point each fact was first established, states the conflict plainly, and carries a confidence mark. Where the timeline is in question, it includes the **extracted timeline** the author can check against their intent. No resolution is written into the prose; the author chooses which fact holds. ## The shelf What this skill reasons from — named as lineage, never reproduced: - **The style sheet.** Amy Schneider, *The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction* (its Characters / Places / Timeline structure), and **CIEP**'s fiction style-sheet practice — the trade's model for a compact canon record. - **The query posture.** The *Chicago Manual of Style* and CIEP on raising an author query rather than silently changing, and the **SFWA** copyeditor's guide (Terry McGarry) on catching errors of logic and continuity — and its catalogue of the classic slips. - **Declared canon.** The author's **story bible** — the novelist's adaptation of television's **show bible** — as the consolidated facts a manuscript is checked against. ## With Calliope (MCP) Connected over the MCP connector, it reads the real book — fetching chapters and searching every mention of a fact across the manuscript — and reads the **Map** as declared canon, so it checks the prose against stated truth instead of re-inferring it. Because this skill writes back, with a subscription it files each flag as marginalia at the exact conflicting scenes and can record a reconciled timeline note in the Map. It still never rewrites prose and never picks canon — continuity flags and notes only. ## Source & license This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code. - **Author:** [Calliope-Editor](https://github.com/Calliope-Editor) - **Source:** [Calliope-Editor/writing-skills](https://github.com/Calliope-Editor/writing-skills) - **License:** MIT - **Homepage:** https://writecalliope.ink/features/mcp Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above. ## Pricing - **Free** — Free ## Security capabilities Automated source analysis of v0.1.0 — what this tool can access: - **Network access:** no - **Filesystem access:** no - **Shell / process execution:** no - **Environment & secrets:** no - **Dynamic code execution:** no *"Yes" means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it is unsafe.* ## Versions - **0.1.0** — security scan: passed — Imported from the upstream source. ## Links - Listing page: https://agentstack.voostack.com/l/skill-calliope-editor-writing-skills-continuity-editor - Seller: https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/calliope-editor - Browse the marketplace: https://agentstack.voostack.com/browse --- Listed on AgentStack — the marketplace for AI agent skills and MCP servers. 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