Coming soon.
The Grimoire
A planning tool built for horror writers
A story planning tool built for horror and gothic prose fiction. Not a writing environment. Not a course. A craft and organizational layer that runs alongside whatever you already use to draft.
The Grimoire is built around an original five-lever framework for generating and sustaining dread across a full novel. You track your beats, your motifs, your characters, and how fear is distributed across the manuscript. The goal is simple: so the dread you build stays intentional, act to act, chapter to chapter, all seventy thousand words.
The Problem
Horror falls apart without intentional structure
Every story planning tool available is genre-neutral. That is the correct design choice for a general tool. But horror has specific craft problems that general tools cannot surface.
Dread is cumulative. It builds across beats, acts, and the entire arc of a novel, and it erodes in specific ways: when the same mechanism fires too many times, when a motif stops migrating and becomes a warning system, when pacing runs too hot for too long and the reader's nervous system adapts. None of those problems are continuity errors. They are horror problems. A tool that does not understand that cannot help you catch them.
The Grimoire tracks what genre-neutral tools do not see.
The Five Levers
Five dimensions of dread, in precise balance
These are not genre conventions or beat types. They are mechanisms, distinct ways of generating dread in prose. Each one operates differently. Each one has a failure mode. Each one requires a specific kind of craft discipline to use well.
- Environmental. The world has a set of rules. This lever works by breaking one of them, quietly, without explanation, and without character panic. The horror is in the gap between what should be and what is.
- Psychic. The protagonist's perception is the instrument and the threat. What they see may be real. What they feel may be induced. The horror is that they cannot tell, and neither can the reader.
- Character. Dread through transformation. Someone the protagonist trusted is no longer recognizable. The horror is not that a monster appeared. It is that a person disappeared.
- Structural. The narrative form itself becomes unreliable or threatening. Chapter breaks that feel wrong. A voice that shifts. The reader feels the story is doing something to them, not just to the characters.
- Sensory. Wrong smells, textures, and sounds arrive before the visual threat does. The body registers danger before the mind catches up. This lever is most effective as a precursor, not a reveal.
The Grimoire tracks which levers you have pulled, how often, and in what sequence. It flags redundancy before repetition kills your dread. The framework lives inside the app as a full reference tab: definitions, examples from an original manuscript, and the specific mistake each lever makes when deployed carelessly.
Features
Everything the horror writer needs, nothing they don't
The Beat Builder organizes your scenes by act with drag-and-drop reordering, lever tagging, focal character, motif attachment, tension rating, and page reference. The Motif Tracker logs each appearance with act, beat, and page, flags redundancy when a motif has appeared in too many consecutive beats, and marks intentional repeats so the flag never overrides your craft decisions. The Characters tab tracks perception modes and shows each character's distribution across beats so you can see when someone has gone dormant.
The Overview dashboard shows lever distribution across the full project, active flags, and recently visited beats. The Horror Levers, Craft Reference, and Foundations tabs are in-app reading material, the craft theory that underpins the tracking, available without leaving your work.
Origin Story
Built out of necessity, refined by obsession
Ash & Echoes is a folk horror novel I am currently working on. I have completed the first act and found it difficult to track certain aspects of the horror I was developing. So I built The Grimoire. The manuscript follows two characters through a village being consumed by something older than its own history, something that operates through environmental wrongness, through transformation, through the body's knowledge arriving before the mind's. Writing it, I developed a vocabulary for how fear works in prose that I had not found in any existing framework. The five levers emerged from that vocabulary, not as theory but as tool. This is the thing I noticed happening in scenes that worked. This is why scenes did not work when they should have.
By Act II it was really pulling its weight on tracking these mechanics and where they had appeared. Which motifs were migrating and which had calcified into signals. Where the sensory lever had been used so I was not accidentally saturating the reader with sensory overload.
That sounds clean. It was not. The first version was a spreadsheet. Then a notes document with too many headers. Then a prototype I threw out. The Grimoire is the version that finally worked, the tool I actually wanted to have open in the other window while I drafted. The framework in the app is the framework from the manuscript. The craft reference inside it is the thing I had to learn the hard way. The examples throughout are from Ash & Echoes, because the novel and the tool grew together and the examples are the most honest ones I have.
If you are writing horror prose and you are past the first act, you have already felt the version of this problem I am describing. The Grimoire is the tool I built to solve it.