Feature · Stage 3, Check the book

You introduced it, and then you let it go.

A rule, a faction, an object that mattered in chapter four and never appears again. It is nearly invisible while you are writing, because you remember the whole book at once and your reader does not. This measures where each term actually stops.

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Established, then dropped

Gerstial

103 mentions, ch 2 to ch 29, then nothing for the last 45%

Beatrict

43 mentions, ch 2 to ch 13, then nothing for the last 75%

Nirloden

13 mentions, ch 3 to ch 17, then nothing for the last 67%

Only terms mentioned five times or more, that ran across a fifth of the book first.

How it works

Two silences, one measurement.

Stopped early

Terms whose last mention falls before the 60 per cent mark, so the whole back of the book never touches them. Sorted by how heavily the term was used, because a name mentioned forty times and dropped a third of the way in is a louder result than one mentioned five times.

It has to have been established first

A term only counts here if it ran across at least a fifth of the book before it stopped. Without that condition the list fills with terms that live inside one scene, which were never set up and so cannot have been dropped. That one rule cut the busiest book we tested from seventy rows to seventeen.

Long gaps

The same silence measured in the middle instead of at the end: a term that goes 40 per cent of the book without a single mention and then comes back. Sometimes that is the structure you intended, and sometimes it is a reader who has forgotten what the word means.

Five mentions before anything counts

Below that a term was never established, and a term used once is already covered by the one-off terms report. This one is about things your book set up properly and then left behind.

Use cases

Where this helps.

Second and third drafts

Finding the subplot that lost its thread when a chapter was cut, without rereading to look for it.

Series writing

Checking which of book one's ideas actually carry through to the end of it.

Fantasy and science fiction

An invented rule that stops being mentioned reads to a reader as an invented rule that stopped applying.

Structural edits

Answering a beta reader who says the middle sags, with the list of things the middle quietly drops.

FAQ

Questions about this report.

Is a dropped term a mistake?

Often not, and nothing here is counted as work. A character can leave, an object can be destroyed, a place can be behind them for good. The report says where each term stops and leaves the judgement to you.

Why five mentions?

Because fewer than that is not an established term, it is a passing reference. Terms mentioned exactly once have their own report, and reporting them here as well would say the same thing twice.

Does it use chapters or percentages?

Chapters wherever the scan identified them confidently, and a percentage through the manuscript otherwise. Where both are known you get both, because the chapter tells you which file to open and the percentage tells you how far in it sits.

What if my book is very long?

A very large scan thins the mention positions it sends, to keep the response inside a sensible size. Where that happens the long gaps panel is left out entirely rather than shown, because a thinned list of positions is evenly spread and every gap measured on it would look believable and be wrong. The stopped early panel is unaffected, because a first and a last mention always survive.

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