The Victim Orders Coffee in Chapter 30. Shiro Noticed.
Shiro checks a novel for continuity errors in two ways. Plain code, with no AI in it, compares the facts you keep on scenes and characters: one place at a time, nobody on stage after death, ages, time moving forward, travel time and the order of reveals. A separate Continuity action asks a model to read the prose for what code can’t see.
Checks That Need No Model
These run on your computer as the story changes, and the results collect under World, in Checks. Five are on from the start.
- One place at a time. Tomas is in Lisbon in one scene and in Porto in another, both on “Day 3”.
- Not on stage after death. Someone dies in one scene and is listed in the cast of a later one, or of a later book in a series.
- Ages only go up. She’s 34 in book one and 31 in book two, which is either a mistake or a very good moisturiser.
- Time enough to travel. Once a map has a scale and your routes have speeds, you get findings like “Hortense gets from Harrow to Saltmere in 1 day. 240 mi by road, at 30 mi a day, takes 8 days.”
- Known before used. A character acts on a secret before the scene where they learn it.
Two more are there to add when your book needs them.
- Story time goes forward. A scene’s date falls before the one in front of it, and nobody said it was a flashback.
- Revealed in order. You name what the reader must learn first, and Shiro tells you if the solution turns up before the clue.
The same templates let you write your own: a fact that never changes, such as which hand she writes with; a number that stays within limits, such as mana above zero; two characters who must never share a scene; no more than two points of view in a chapter.
What the Code Reads
It reads fields, not sentences. The checks look at the cast, place and story time on each scene, the facts on your World entries and the scale on your map. If the Place field is empty, the check can’t see the scene, however clearly your prose puts Tomas in Porto.
You can fill those fields by hand. With a model available, Shiro can fill the empty ones in the background, and each value keeps the words it came from. That is on local models only unless you change it, and with AI off the fields are yours to fill.
A finding isn’t always a mistake. Mark a scene as a flashback and time may run backwards in it. Mark it as a dream and the dead aunt may pour the tea. You can dismiss any finding and bring it back later, turn a check off for a project, or change how severe it is.
What a Model Adds
The Continuity action sends the scenes to a model, along with your World entries and summaries of earlier books, and asks for what fields can’t show: a detail that contradicts one given earlier, timing the story doesn’t allow, a point of view or tense that drifts inside a scene. It runs when you ask, on the model you’ve chosen, and hidden scenes aren’t sent.
Every finding has to quote the exact sentence. If the quote isn’t in the scene, the finding is thrown out, which keeps the model from reporting errors in a book it imagined. Findings arrive as comments, and nothing in the manuscript changes.
The limits are real. One run reads about 60,000 characters of scene text in book order, roughly 10,000 words, and reports at most eight findings. On a novel that means the opening, so a quiet result isn’t a clean bill of health.
Two relatives work the same way. World rules reads the scenes that name a rule you’ve written down and looks for breaches. Not forgotten looks for characters who seem to have lost something they learned.
Our guide to continuity errors covers the rest, including what to look for by hand on the last read-through, which no checker replaces.
The Questions People Ask
Can software find the plot holes in my novel?
Some of them. Shiro’s checks catch contradictions in the facts: who was where, who was dead, how long the journey takes. A model can catch some contradictions in the prose. A hole in the logic of the plot, such as why nobody calls the police, usually takes a human reader.
Do the continuity checks need AI?
No. They are ordinary code, they run on your computer, and they keep working with AI turned off. Only the Continuity action and its relatives, World rules and Not forgotten, use a model.
Will flashbacks set them off?
Not if you say it’s a flashback. Each scene has a frame: flashback, flash-forward, dream, hypothetical, a tale within the story, or unreliable. The frame tells the checks what to leave alone there.
Do they work with an invented calendar?
Yes. Set the book’s calendar and story times are read in it, so time order, travel time and ages still add up. They also take ordinary dates and “Day 3”.