Today I want to walk through the exact process I used to turn Wolf Wounds from a loose idea into a full structural outline. It started, as most of my books do, with a call-and-response session between me and the AI — a creative volley where I push, it pushes back, and together we find the shape under the noise. Once we had enough raw material, I forced a hard stop and asked what I always ask at the edge of Act III: Where is everyone right now? What do they want? What’s pushing them forward? That snapshot exposed what was missing, what was bloated, and what needed clarity. From there, I made decisive choices: naming Gregory as the brother, anchoring Blaine as the boy, grounding Caleb’s motives, establishing The Vault’s origin in WWII occult recovery, and keeping Dominion in a gritty black-ops lane. With all that aligned, we finally expanded everything into a complete four-act structure — one that feels fully self-contained, emotional, and deliberate. That entire process took the book from “cool idea” to “real thing.”

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Turning the Outline Into a Working Machine (Atticus Phase)

After locking the outline, I moved everything into Atticus, the writing software I use to structure and export my books. This is the moment the project stops being abstract and becomes mechanical in the best way. Atticus forces each chapter into its own container; each container gets its own short synopsis. Seeing the whole story broken into discrete parts shows me instantly where pacing is off, where emotional beats land too close together, or where things get thin. It’s not glamorous, but it’s essential. Atticus turns chaos into geometry — and I need that geometry before I start swinging narrative hammers.

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The Placeholder Chapter Technique

Next comes the placeholder phase. I generate a quick, imperfect paragraph for every chapter in Atticus. These aren’t drafts — they’re scaffolds. They give me tone, not truth. Momentum, not polish. I throw most of them away on purpose. They exist to keep the AI from spiraling outward, inventing new lore or extra characters every time I dig into a scene. Placeholders keep the boundaries firm while the imagination stays loose.

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Why Re-Reading Is the Secret Weapon (My Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Brain)

This process requires a lot of re-reading. And that skill — the endurance for it, the weird joy of revisiting branches — started for me when I was a kid devouring Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Most kids read them once.
I read every branch.
Then every permutation of every branch.
Then I’d go back and re-map the entire narrative in my head like it was a puzzle.

That trained a part of my brain that still drives my writing today:

• the ability to hold multiple possible futures at once
• the instinct to track consequences across side paths
• the obsession with knowing where every character is at every moment
• the willingness to kill a path if it dead-ends
• the curiosity to follow branches that aren’t “fun,” just revealing

If you’ve read The Cancer Diet or The Lying Years, you’ve already seen that brain at work.
If you’ve read the outline for Wolf Wounds, you can see it again.

Re-reading isn’t repetitious for me — it’s cartography.

And Wolf Wounds needed a map.

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Why This Stage Matters

This is the moment where the book stops being vapor and starts being architecture. It’s where I see whether:

• the arcs land
• the themes actually pay off
• the ending is earned
• the characters stay honest
• the emotional weight is consistent
• the pacing breathes properly

Atticus helps me get objective; re-reading helps me get honest.

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What’s Next

Now that the outline is fully formed:

1. I’ll re-read the entire Atticus map again with a fresh brain.
2. I’ll adjust pacing and emotional rhythms.
3. I’ll refine summaries before drafting.
4. I’ll start drafting real chapters — with placeholders as guides, not rules.
5. I’ll rewrite everything in my voice.
6. I’ll prepare a downloadable PDF so readers can follow the evolution step-by-step.

The story is alive now — and more importantly, it’s trackable.

— Frank