After much trial and error, I now have a world that is starting to come alive.

It’s got a nice space-like theme, but I’m not too happy with the current one. Dates are formatted to look futuristic, but once you understand the format, they are easy to read. 5026v2.01 is January 2, 2026. Ignore the “50” prefix – the three numbers are in the order of Year, Day, Month (50y\vj.m). Time is a 24-hour clock with a pipe, so 04|02 is 4:02 AM.

I was able to work my way through WordPress to create recursive categories and tags, and associate them with posts as they are made. With a worker pool running, I encountered issues with asynchronous reads/writes to the file system while another worker attempted to read an unfinished JSON file. The result was to write the file with a temporary extension, rename it, and perform a few additional in-memory caching steps as a singleton. I could go into more detail, but the code is on GitHub and feels a bit messy. It works…

On top of that, Hostinger added a few plugins, and configuring API access was a big challenge for me until I started asking ChatGPT for help. Before AI, I would use Google Search and often go to Stack Overflow or other forums to find answers. Programmers usually spend much of their time troubleshooting and researching when working with unfamiliar technologies. LLMs cut through the searching and reading to give you the answer you’re looking for. The answer was to look for a new “Hostinger” button and browse the settings they added on top of WordPress. I needed to toggle the “Disable Application Passwords” off so that my accounts could access the API.

World Documents

With that said, I started focusing on the world documents. Silly me initially started off the world without anything to seed it other than the character personas – yet the entire idea that launched this was focused around stories and notes I had written in the past. Currently, all of the authors keep talking about Captain Mira Voss, Elysia, and to “Trust the stars“.

I started adding a ton of my stories and notes to the .storyforge/world/docs folder. Well, it was just too much. I truncate the world docs after 18k. To work around this limitation, I did two things. First, I randomized the order of documents sent to OpenAI, so that each time a story is generated, it has a different set of information about the world than the prior request. Next, I threw my notes into ChatGPT and asked it to distill them into terse, simplified world-building notes. That lets me send in more “ideas” than the original stories and notes.

At one time, long ago, I was talking to a digital voice recorder, then automating the process of converting its recordings to text. Just talking about stuff, throwing out ideas – we speak differently than when we write. There were lots of pauses and filler words. Some of it was not understandable by the software. So using ChatGPT on that output reduced everything as well.

Master File

With all my files added, I asked ChatGPT to create a master file. Holy smokes! It came up with a core premise, foundational concepts, timelines, technologies, culture & society, government and power, economics of reality, aliens, plot pillars, central characters, conflicts, recurring themes, and… an end question.

It figured out the question I’ve been dancing around in all my little stories and fragments, and it should be the primary focus for readers. Not only a question, but a condition that leads to the question.

What’s Next

The main thing that I need to do is to automate the whole process. Currently there are a few scripts that I’m running one after another.

node ./src/story-forge.mjs init
node ./src/story-forge.mjs persona:create reporter theo
node ./src/story-forge.mjs story:generate --persona reporter-theo
# The rest are done in batches
node ./src/feature-image.mjs 

#### Stop ####
# Before you go further, setup your persona with a blog
# And with the Editor role so that they can create tags/categories
#
node ./src/upload-feature-image.mjs
# if a singer persona, you may want to work on song prompts
node ./src/music-maker.mjs
node ./src/upload-post.mjs

I need to set up a process to create a story, create an image, upload the picture, and upload the story. I’ve already written the logic. I need to have it executed.

Templates

I’m struggling with the limitations that 3rd-party templates introduce, unless you pay for the individual templates upgrade. But even then, I don’t know if I’ll still be fighting with it. I’m starting to create my own templates from scratch. There is also a difference between using WordPress on WordPress.com and on Hostinger. There are benefits, but a few features are missing, like the ability to duplicate existing pages. I can install the Jetpack plugin to see if that feature becomes available.

The LiteSpeed Cache (LSCache) service is irritating because I keep forgetting to clear the page cache whenever I make changes to the templates or pages. I wish there were a WordPress plugin that told LSCache to clear the page from cache every time I save it.

Personalities

The personas created from the templates can’t upload images or create posts until a blog account is configured. I’m curious whether I can automate that as well, so that when a new character is made from a persona template, I can create an account for them on WordPress and generate their app password. This would give me the flexibility to create accounts on the fly without manual intervention.

The other thing I’d like to do is to have different personalities post more often than others. A reporter may post daily, while the old wise man may post once a month. Another can post a challenge, and some of the authors could create a story based on it. A politician would only post after a significant event or weigh in on another’s story.

Speaking of which, I’ve started looking into letting the persona link to stories from others or from their own. Something isn’t working at the moment. I at least got it to start adding HTML tags for styling.