Creative Stages

Every book in your project lands in one of five creative stages. This is Ishvana’s opinion about where your book is in its life cycle, and it’s computed automatically from your outline status, word count, and the breakdown of your completion score. You don’t set a book’s stage manually. You can’t override it. The stage is a signal, not a status field, and the honest answer to “why is my book in Drafting and not Developing?” is always “because your numbers say so.”

The five stages

Foundation

Core story structure is still being established. A book lands here when its overall completion is under 12%, or its outline status is unknown, or both. Foundation is where a book spends its earliest weeks — you have an idea, maybe a few characters, maybe a rough outline, but the scaffolding isn’t in place yet. Desktop’s opinion is that the most valuable thing you can do for a Foundation-stage book is outline work and core Legendry entries, not prose.

The summary the dossier shows for Foundation books: core story structure still being established.

Drafting

Early structure exists but the book needs significant buildout. Under 38% overall, or under 10,000 words, or word-count is the book’s weakest dimension. Drafting is the stage where you’re turning an outline into an actual manuscript — most of your open questions are still about what happens in chapter 6, and most of your time is in the editor.

Summary: early structure, needs more buildout.

Developing

The book is moving, but major dimensions are still unresolved. Under 70% overall, or plot-resolution / plant-payoff / promise-fulfillment is the weakest dimension. Developing is the long middle of a project. You have scenes, you have characters, you have a plot — but you also have open plot threads, plants that haven’t paid off, and promises the narrative hasn’t fulfilled yet. Most books spend more time in Developing than in any other stage.

Summary: moving, major dimensions unresolved.

Closing

Converging toward readiness. Under 90% overall, with at least one weakest dimension sitting below 85%. Closing is the pre-submission polish stage. The structural work is done, the draft is mostly complete, and what’s left is closing the last few open threads and hitting the final word count targets. Closing-stage books tend to need short, focused editing passes rather than new chapter drafting.

Summary: converging toward readiness.

Readying

Approaching creative readiness. 88% or above overall, with appropriate outline status. A Readying-stage book is close enough to done that you should be thinking about submission, beta readers, cover art, or print layout — not writing new chapters. If a book lands in Readying and you’re still adding plot, Ishvana’s opinion is that you’re adding scope, not finishing the book.

Summary: approaching creative readiness.

The stage map

At the top of Desktop, above the manuscript register, there’s a horizontal stage map — five lanes labeled Foundation, Drafting, Developing, Closing, Readying, each showing how many books are currently in that stage. Click any lane and the register filters to just that stage. It’s a faster version of the Developing lens when you want a single specific stage instead of a range.

The stage map is the view you glance at when you want to know the shape of your whole project. Three Foundation books and one Readying book is a very different project-state than four Developing books, and the map makes the difference obvious at a distance.

How stages are classified

The classification logic runs every time completion data loads or the formula changes. Outline status takes priority over percentages — a book whose outline is marked “Unknown” lands in Foundation even if it’s at 40% overall, because “I don’t know what the outline is” is a Foundation-stage problem no matter how much raw text exists.

After outline status, the classifier looks at the overall completion percentage and the weakest dimension:

1. Under 12% overall → Foundation
2. Under 38% overall, OR word count is the weakest dimension → Drafting
3. Under 70% overall, OR plot/plant/promise dimension is weakest → Developing
4. Under 90% overall, OR any weakest dimension is under 85% → Closing
5. 88% or above overall, with outline appropriate → Readying

The boundaries aren’t arbitrary. Each one marks a point where the kind of work that moves the book forward changes. A book in Foundation needs structural work. A book in Drafting needs word count. A book in Developing needs thread resolution. A book in Closing needs polish. A book in Readying needs to ship.

Stages are opinionated

You can’t override a book’s stage. That’s deliberate. The stage is a diagnostic signal, not a status label. If you disagree with the stage, the right fix is to update the underlying numbers — finish the outline, write the words, resolve the plotlines — not to argue with the classifier. A manual override would let you mark a book as Readying when it’s actually at 40% completion, which would break the whole purpose of the stage map.

Why there are exactly five

Four is too few. Three stages (early, middle, late) collapses the difference between “I’m starting out” and “I have an outline but no prose” into one bucket, which hides the question of whether you need outline work or drafting work. Six or more stages adds bureaucracy — nobody needs seven distinct labels for “still working on it.”

Five is the number where each stage corresponds to a distinct kind of work. That’s what makes it useful.

What’s next

The Completion Formula How the completion percentages that drive stage classification are actually computed.

Tracking Your Books The register, the lenses, and the stage map in context.

The Attention Queue Stage is one of three signals that trigger the Attention Queue.