Editorial letters for early drafts

Know what to work on in your next draft.

Get an editorial letter on your chapter: specific passages, reasons grounded in writing craft, and a few priorities for your next revision. AI-assisted analysis, reviewed by Aksel. You write every change.

Get feedback on a chapter Read a sample letter

Free while the site is being tested, no card anywhere. The letter usually comes back within a few days.

What a note looks like · from a real read of a real draft

But he'd clearly heard that something in my phrasing earlier that day was slightly off, and it was obvious he found the whole thing a little exciting:

— Can I ask an old sea dog for advice?

Suggest cutting: Two lines down he clears his throat and straightens his back — the moment already shows this. Cut the explanation and let the reader discover it.
Effect on the reader: The reader is told what to feel a beat before she would have felt it herself, and the discovery is spent.
Try next: Find every place the narrator says what the next gesture is about to show. Read the scene once without them.

See the whole page, and the letter it came from ↓

The work stays yours

Nothing here rewrites your book or hands you back a tidier draft. You do the writing, which is the whole point, and the letter is built so that you can do it with more to go on.

What you get is what an editor gives you. A close reading of your actual pages, close enough to say where the attention drops and why it drops there. The reasoning is shown every time, so that you can weigh it, argue with it, and use it again in chapters nobody else will read.

Notes are tied to lines

Each one quotes the passage it is about, so you can go and find it. A note that cannot be pinned to a place in your text does not go in the letter.

Every note says why

What is happening and why it has that effect, before what to change.

Nothing is measured against an average

There is no target percentage for dialogue. A quiet chapter and a party get judged differently, which is why the form asks what the book is going for.

Problems come with next steps

If a draft is not ready, the letter says so, and says what to do about it, in an order.

Encouragement is not the product

You probably already have somewhere your pages are well received. This is for the other thing. Where something is genuinely good you get told exactly what makes it work, because that is the part you can use again.

It teaches while it edits

Every note explains the mechanism, and names the craft source where that helps; how much of the teaching you want is your choice in the brief. The aim is that you need the tool a little less with every read.

A sample letter, on the page it came from

The draft is mine — one raw freewriting pass from the novel I am writing, translated so you can follow the quotes. The original is Norwegian and was read in Norwegian. Unpolished on purpose: this is the kind of page you would actually send. Below the page are two of the nine findings from the letter it got, in full.

Chapter draft, first pass · a son calls his father · excerpt from a real readRed = change · yellow = works, keep it

Dad picked up a little faster than usual, as if he'd been sitting there waiting for the answer key to all the speculation he'd been building up — and for all I know had even been debating it with his wife, Theresa. Was it money trouble, was it things with Margareth, was she pregnant, had I quit my job, or was it something else entirely, something he didn't have the imagination to speculate about? He didn't know. But he'd clearly heard that something in my phrasing earlier that day was slightly off, and it was obvious he found the whole thing a little exciting:

— Can I ask an old sea dog for advice?

I was pleased with the opening line. It set up a nice distance and took some of the danger out of what was coming, and it confirmed that something big was under way. I was lit up, wired; I couldn't for the life of me sit still on the grandstand and talk the way I'd imagined it, so I wandered, now and then all but hopped, restless, between tired planks and mutinous nails.

— You are, after all, the most experienced man I know in the field.

I meant his three marriages and, shall we say, somewhat overlapping transitional arrangements, but I wasn't sure he'd caught it yet. He cleared his throat; I could almost hear him straighten his back, senses sharpening:

— Go on, then.

I couldn't be bothered to beat about the bush any longer:

— I'm considering leaving Margareth.

Every note in a real letter is tied to a line like these. The craft it draws on — R.U.E. (resist the urge to explain), the emphatic position, Stein's indirection — is named in the findings, where it is used.

From the feedback letter

Every note above is a finding in the letter. Here are two of the nine from this read — the evidence, the reasoning, the move, and the craft source named where it is used. The quotes are live: click one to jump to the line it marks.

What works

The reveal is held to the last line, and nothing relieves it early

The opening line does not ask the real question — it asks permission to ask one: «Can I ask an old sea dog for advice?» And every line after it raises the price without naming the goods: a compliment that is really a joke about three marriages, a cleared throat, and one whole line for the father, «Go on, then.» The business arrives in the final position: «I'm considering leaving Margareth.»

Why it works: two mechanisms are stacked. The dialogue is oblique — this is Sol Stein's indirection: direct exchanges kill a scene, talking around the point powers it, because a reader who must assemble what is unsaid presses harder than one being told. And the charged thing lands at the end, in what Strunk called the emphatic position — the place in a sentence, and by extension a scene, where weight naturally falls. Every line before the last one becomes fuse. A first draft that does both by instinct should protect this shape through every revision.

What to improve

Twice, the draft explains what it has already proved

«I was lit up, wired» stands directly beside its own evidence — a man who cannot sit still, wandering «between tired planks and mutinous nails». And at the other end of the line, «it was obvious he found the whole thing a little exciting» arrives two lines before he clears his throat and straightens his back — the moment that shows the same thing without a word.

Why it matters: naming the feeling first collects the reader's response in advance — told the call is exciting, she reads the moment as an illustration instead of feeling it land. Browne & King call the discipline R.U.E. — Resist the Urge to Explain — and it is the most common note on strong first drafts, because the evidence is usually already on the page and the explanation is scaffolding left standing. The move: cut both clauses, change nothing else. Normal debris of a freewriting pass; revision only has to stop explaining.

A scene built on delay, written by a narrator who marks every guess as a guess. The revision here is subtraction, not surgery — and the letter's job is to show you which five words to subtract.

What this actually is

An AI tool I built around my notes from the books on writing craft I have collected over many years. The model underneath is Claude, made by Anthropic; my notes are the instructions it works from, not something it was trained on. What that buys you is narrow and useful: every finding has to name the failure mode it belongs to, quote the passage from your page, and end in a step you can take.

You write every word of the book. It does not draft scenes, finish chapters or hand you prose to keep. The letter points at your pages, and the rewriting happens in your manuscript, wherever you write.

I read every letter before it goes out, cut what does not hold, and sign it.

What comes back is analysis and a plan. Your text is not rewritten.

How it works

01
Tell me what the book is
A short form: genre, where the draft is, what is bothering you about it, and what you want from this read. Most writers have this written down somewhere already. Paste it in; rough and fast is fine, it gets sorted at this end.
02
Send the pages
A chapter, three chapters, or the whole thing. Finished or half-finished. While the site is being tested it is free at every length, up to 250,000 words in one go. If what helps is being read often while you draft, that suits me fine.
03
The tool reads it twice
Once straight through, marking where the attention moves and where it drops, because that is usually where the real problem is. Then again against the craft library, where every finding has to name the failure mode it belongs to and quote the passage it is about.
04
You get a letter
Written to a writer rather than filed about a manuscript. What is working and why, what is not and why, and what to do first. I read it before you do. Your file is exactly as you sent it: the letter points at the pages, and the rewriting is yours to do, in your manuscript, wherever you write.
05
You tell me what helped
After each read you mark what was useful and what you have no need of. The next letter to you is written with that in front of it, so it builds on what you used instead of repeating it.

Start with one chapter

It is the cheapest way to find out whether this is any use to you, and while the site is being tested it is free.

The first send takes about five minutes: the pages, and eight short questions about the book. The rest of the brief is optional and can be added later. The more the read knows about the whole book, the more the notes are about your book rather than about chapters in general, so it pays to add it when you can.

The loop is short enough to live inside the writing. The letter comes back within days, you rewrite, and when you want to know whether the fix took, you send the rewritten chapter as a new read.

Who this is for

This is for you if

The draft is early and messy, and you would rather not put it in front of a person yet
You have been turned down, and the reply told you nothing you could act on
You have had notes from someone, and cannot work out which of them to believe
You are stuck, and cannot tell whether the problem is this chapter or the shape of the whole book
You want to know what is wrong before you pay for a professional edit or start querying agents
The book is close, and you want the last of it squeezed out

This is not for you if

You want the writing done for you
You want to be told it is good
You have not written anything yet
You would rather no AI tooling touched your manuscript at any stage

Where this came from

It was built backwards: I write, and I wanted a better reader for my own manuscript than I could find or afford, so I made one. Thirty craft books went in as notes, and one instruction has never been relaxed: always say why, and say where the reasoning comes from.

The whole story →

Questions people ask first

Who owns my manuscript?: You do, entirely. It is not published, not shared with other customers, and not used as an example without asking you first. Two parties handle it to produce the letter: me, and Anthropic's Claude, which does the reading. Delete it whenever you like, from your account; the privacy page says exactly what happens then, on my side and on theirs.
How long does it take?: A few days, usually. Every letter is reviewed before it goes out: I read it, cut what does not hold, and sign it. If something is going to take longer, you get told.
What languages do you work in?: Send the pages in any language, and fill the brief in whichever language you think in. The craft does not change across borders. The letter itself comes back in English. Every quotation from your manuscript is reproduced exactly as you wrote it and never translated, because an example loses most of what makes it an example in translation, and because you need to find the line on your own page.
How is this different from pasting my chapter into a chatbot?: Two things you can check for yourself in the sample above. Every finding quotes your page and names the failure mode it belongs to, from a fixed set of notes taken from craft books, so you can see the reasoning and go to the source. And a person reads the letter before you do, and takes out what does not hold. A conversation with a general model can be useful too; it will not give you a letter you can argue with line by line, or one that remembers what you said about the last one.
Will an AI detector flag my manuscript because I used this?: The letter never contains replacement sentences to paste in, so no machine-written prose enters your manuscript through this service; your pages stay as you wrote them. What a third-party detector makes of prose a person wrote is that detector's problem, and nobody can promise you anything about it. The narrow claim is the honest one: nothing here writes into your book.
Where does AI belong in writing a book?: On the getting-better side, never on the writing side. This tool never rewrites a sentence, never hands you a prettier phrasing to paste in, never touches the prose. The words are yours, the story is yours, and the choices stay yours, including the choice to disagree with your editor, which is a fine old tradition among writers.
How does it fit into the actual writing?: Writing and editing are two different processes, and they should not happen at the same time, ideally not even on the same day. Write however you write, in whatever you write in; I draft on a Freewrite, collect in Evernote, and structure in Scrivener, and none of that is this tool's business. When a draft exists and you can look at it cold, send it. The letter belongs to that second process: deciding whether something should be described differently, whether the story wants telling another way. Then you go back and do the writing.
Why does the letter name craft books?: Because a note you can trace is a note you can learn from. The library behind this is the thirty-odd best books about writing I know of, together with my own notes and highlights from years of reading them, and the letter says which of them a note draws on where that helps. You can read about a technique ten times and still not own it. It sticks when you get feedback on your own use of it, in pages you care about, with the source named right where it applies. How much of this you want is your choice in the brief: findings and fixes only, the mechanism explained, or the craft taught as we go.
Can I send a rewritten chapter back?: Yes. Send it as a new read and point it at the earlier one. The letter starts from the last letter and what you marked on it, and where the earlier pages are still on file, from the text as it was, so it can say what changed. Each read comes with one revision of its own letter; a rewritten chapter is a new read, not a revision, and while the site is being tested it is free.
Is this a replacement for a professional editor?: No. The job here is what comes before one: getting a manuscript good enough that an editor or an agent takes it seriously and puts real hours into it. That is the narrowest gate in publishing, and most drafts never reach it.
What if the book is already good?: Then that is what you get told, with the reasons it works, and the letter goes on the next level up instead of inventing objections to justify itself. An experienced writer who receives manufactured criticism stops trusting the source immediately, and is right to.
Do you read non-fiction?: Not what it was built for. It was built for crafting stories, both invented ones and stories drawn from real life, which covers memoir and narrative non-fiction. On other non-fiction I have simply not tested it.

Send me a chapter

The site is being tested at the moment, so it is free: a chapter, several, or the whole manuscript, and no card to enter. I would rather have real books going through it than money right now, and what I ask in return is that you tell me what the letter was worth, especially where it read your book wrong.

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