This section collects the recurring problems of writing Gyrealm and whatever we have figured out about solving them. Where voices/ asks who should tell this story and scenes/ asks how does a given voice handle this material, craft/ asks a third question: what keeps going wrong, and what can be done about it on purpose?
Organization#
The section bundles by problem. Each bundle is a directory whose pages approach one problem from different angles, the way each scene bundle approaches one prompt in different voices. A bundle accumulates over time; it is not written once and closed.
Five kinds of page live inside a bundle. Frontmatter carries both axes — problem and craft_kind — so Hugo templates can list a bundle’s pages or gather every page of a given kind across bundles. (The field is craft_kind rather than kind because kind is reserved by Hugo.)
craft_kind | What it holds |
|---|---|
problem | What goes wrong, stated plainly, with observed instances in real pages. Always the bundle’s _index.md. |
analysis | Why it goes wrong here — the structural cause underneath the symptoms. |
prior-art | Solutions that already exist, in published fiction, in real-world practice, or already adopted in this project. |
technique | A named, runnable procedure. A bundle may hold several as they accumulate. |
speculation | Untested ideas, explicitly unratified. A holding pen, not a recommendation. |
The kinds are a working taxonomy, not a template to fill. A bundle with nothing worth speculating about does not get a speculation page.
Current bundles#
- Spatial and Directional Consistency — the reader’s ability to point. Directions inside a rotating cylinder do not behave the way Earth’s directional vocabulary assumes, and the prose has been quietly inheriting Earth’s assumptions.
- World State — the wiki stores facts as sentences on pages, so a fact cannot be scoped to the region and interval where it is actually true, contradictions cannot be detected, and prose can silently become canon.
- Food Systems — every writer carries a complete, wrong model of where food comes from. A habitat inverts it: land dear, energy free, storage cheap, fields dangerous. The bundle records the requirements, the constraints, the candidate systems, and the adversarial pass that decided what shipped.
- Narrative Layers — a rendering asked to change only its words also changes its facts and its vantage. Facts, stance, and diction have different owners, and the layers leak downward: a voice cannot be rendered without asserting things. The bundle catalogs the leakage, explains why it is structural, and holds the sweep-and-triage technique.
Relationship to the rules#
A technique that proves itself here is a candidate for promotion into .claude/rules/, the same path voices/ expects for the eventual chosen voice. Until then a technique page is a proposal with evidence attached, and nothing in this section binds anything.