Story Maintenance

Story Maintenance

Overview

Run deterministic maintenance for Story Skills projects. Use the CLI for structure validation, registry rebuilds, word counts, link checks, continuity checks, project reports, next-action reports, pacing, clue, voice, and name checks, revision-pass tracking, Mermaid diagrams, schema migration, entity helpers, manuscript import, and manuscript export and builds. The creative skills still own story decisions; this skill handles mechanical consistency. It runs a check and reports what it found, and fixes mechanical problems such as broken references and stale registries; deciding what a finding means for the story, and revising the story to fix it, belongs to revision-continuity, plot-structure, voice-style, or genre-craft.

CLI Access

Prefer the first available command:

1. story <command> - when the package bin is installed
2. node scripts/story.js <command> - bundled fallback, resolving scripts/story.js relative to this skill folder
3. node <checkout>/bin/story.js <command> - only when the user names a Story Skills repository checkout or you are working in one, where <checkout> is its path

Write the script in forms 2 and 3 as an absolute path and run the command from the folder you would run story from, so . and other relative paths keep their meaning. Use Node, not Bun or the story script in the checkout's package.json: Bun would load that folder's bunfig.toml (which can run code) and .env, and a package script runs from the checkout's root, so . would be the checkout, not the story project.

If none of these are available, perform the requested maintenance manually using the shared conventions in references/conventions.md.

Run the installed or bundled CLI in place. Do not copy scripts/story.js into the user's story project, and do not create project-local build scripts, generator scripts, or bulk writer scripts to generate story content. Story projects should remain markdown-first, plus explicitly requested exports such as dist/manuscript.md.

Commands

Run commands from the story project root, or pass the story path explicitly.

After any change to story files, run the maintenance block, in this order:

story reindex .
story wordcount . --write
story check .

reindex rebuilds the registries, wordcount --write updates chapter counts (and reindexes again), and check then runs validate, links, and continuity over the settled files. check exits 1 only on errors; warnings print but do not fail it (--strict makes them fail). Every skill ends its edits with this block, followed by any skill-specific checks such as story clues . or story pacing ..

For the full command set, run story --help (every command) or story <command> --help (its flags), or read references/commands.md, which gives an example of each.

The check commands' detailed rules live in references/continuity-checks.md, one section per command. Read the matching section before explaining or acting on a finding. The editing commands' detail (add, rename, move, remove, split, merge, import) lives in references/editing-commands.md, and each build format's in references/builds.md.

Use: