The Familiar
Stories
It writes, and you’re not the main character.
Your Familiar makes fiction out of what you bring it. The transposition is the point: the test isn’t whether your week is disguised, it’s whether it is recognisable.
From your material, never about you.
A bad fortnight at work doesn’t become a character having a bad fortnight at work. It becomes a siege that won’t break, a debt someone inherited, a crossing that takes longer than the supplies allow. You recognise the shape of it, and it belongs to someone else.
That distance is doing real work. Fiction lets you look at something side-on that you can’t look at directly, which is the oldest reason people write it.
It writes in the third person, past tense, always. Second-person narration — “you walk into the room” — is refused outright, because that is the one voice that turns a story back into a mirror.
Worlds and threads
You set up a world together: setting, tone, a cast. Inside it you can run more than one thread at once — separate stories, different people, same place. Nothing obliges you to stay with a world that isn’t working.
How it behaves
Like a co-author, not a content feed.
You can ask for things
Say what you’d like to happen, in ordinary conversation. It takes the request seriously — and sometimes answers, in its own voice, that the groundwork isn’t there yet. The plan bends; it doesn’t break.
It stops if you stop
Let three instalments go unread and it stops writing until you read one. Coming back to a pile is an obligation, and this is meant to be a story you live alongside.
It checks its own prose
Every instalment is checked against recent ones for the slow collapse into repeating itself — reused phrases, the same sentence openings. It would rather revise, or skip a day, than publish that.
A hard line
Some things never become a story.
A story engine that transposes someone’s life into fiction is the highest-risk thing in this app, and it is fenced accordingly. Crisis material is excluded before generation ever sees it — never a story, never a dream, never a mote. And if you write about being hurt by someone, it will not produce a sympathetic-antagonist arc exploring their side. More on that here.
Somebody else carries it for a while.
Stories come with a subscription, in a world the two of you set up first.