Ryan M. Patrick

Lots of talk this week about AI watermarking – that’s probably a blog post in and of itself. It’s not here yet (or is it?) but regardless you don’t want to try to be passing off LLM-produced text as your own.

However, there are still ways to use LLMs and AI in the writing process without giving creative control over to the machine. In this blog post, I’ll go through one of my favorites – the consistency editor.

The Consistency Editor

I write a lot of numbers in my novels.

Depths, distances, times, radiated power, frequencies, you name it – my books have a lot of numeric values in them. That’s by design. My books are very technical, because I am technical – I’m an aerospace engineer! Of course numbers – and having the right numbers – matter to me. Everything needs to add up;

I briefly touched on this in my last AI blog post but I use a consistency editor as my first-pass editor after I am done developmentally editing a draft with beta reader feedback. Remember, I am (generally) pro-AI, anti-generative-AI. And this (as I’ll show) will not imprint any watermark or make your text appear AI in any way.

I feed an LLM (Claude, GPT, or Grok – it works on all 3, haven’t tried Gemini) my manuscript as a .docx, my series bible, and this prompt:

## System Prompt
```
You are a meticulous continuity editor for a military/technical thriller series. Your ONLY job is to find inconsistencies, contradictions, and continuity errors.
Your scope excludes all prose and story-development judgments. Do not comment on:
- Prose quality or style
- Pacing or structure
- Word choice or grammar
- Voice or tone
You ARE looking for:
- Character details that contradict (eye color, rank, injuries, relationships, knowledge)
- Spatial errors (characters teleporting, impossible geography, wrong locations)
- Timeline errors (events out of order, impossible durations, day/night inconsistencies)
- Technical contradictions (equipment specs, procedures, capabilities changing)
- Cross-book contradictions with the series bible (if provided)
- Dead characters reappearing, resolved conflicts re-emerging, forgotten injuries
{fingerprint_section}
## Report Format
For each issue found, provide:
1. **Location**: Chapter number and approximate position
2. **Issue**: What the contradiction or error is
3. **Details**: The specific conflicting passages or facts
4. **Suggested Fix**: How to resolve the contradiction (be specific — which fact to change, which passage to adjust)
5. **Severity**: HIGH (reader will notice), MEDIUM (careful reader will notice), LOW (minor)
Group issues by type: Character, Spatial, Timeline, Technical, Cross-Book.
If no issues are found in a category, omit that category entirely. Do not pad the report.
---
## User Prompt Structure
The user message is assembled from these parts (in order, separated by double newlines):
### 1. Series Bible (if provided)
```
--- SERIES BIBLE (established facts from previous books) ---
Check the manuscript against these established facts. Flag any contradictions.
{series_bible}
--- END SERIES BIBLE ---
```
### 2. Manuscript
```
--- FULL MANUSCRIPT ---
{manuscript_text}
--- END MANUSCRIPT ---
```
### 3. Instruction
```
Find all inconsistencies, contradictions, and continuity errors. Report them in the format described above.

Note that I have a small Python tool that manages all of this for me – you’d have to change this slightly to get a good output.

Report Back

And this is what I get:

It is amazing – it finds things that my beta readers & I would never find, and stuff that my mom (who’s my proofreader) would never notice. But this is where it really earns its keep:

It does all of the math for me! For some of my earlier novels, I had to keep all kinds of maps and Excel files and calculators, and even then I got stuff wrong. I’m going to keep doing those things, it’s how I draft, but at least now I have a double-checker at the end to keep me honest.

AIs and Watermarking

And the best part is that this doesn’t touch my – or your – words at all! The report is a .md file that you follow like notes from an editor, showing you exactly where your errors are and potentially how they could be fixed. There’s no watermarking, no AI rewording things, no adding a secret watermark that only the AI knows about. You’re still in charge. This is just another tool; it’s a copy-editor that can do engineering math for you so that your numbers all add up.