BETA TESTING: Ink & Ruin Dark Romance Writing

Welcome. You’re testing Ink & Ruin, a dark-romance planning + drafting workspace. You stay creative director.

This beta is manual / bring-your-own-AI. The app holds decisions, codex, outline, manuscript, and exports. It does not generate chapters on our API. Paste briefs into ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc., then paste prose back.

It’s called Ink & Ruin, and it was built for a different job: a dark romance workspace you can open in a browser, walk through the full spine, and use with the AI you already pay for — without installing a local app and without one beta tester emptying my API credits.

What’s in Ink & Ruin

• Decision Lab — the questions your book needs before Chapter 1. Tropes, stakes, heat level, dynamic, elements (including dubcon/CNC when you check them), hard limits that become law. Wizard path or “interview me” path. Lock when you’re ready.
• Planning → Codex → Outline — premise, living story bible, chapter map. Seed from your decisions; edit by hand.
• Draft Studio — the page stays yours. Type. Paste. Direct. Copy a chapter brief for your AI, bring the prose back, keep the manuscript in one place.
• Edit Desk — clear notes, rewrites you control, not a black-box “fix everything.”
• Export — Markdown, DOCX, Google-paste friendly. Cover prompt with the title baked in. Trigger warnings generated from your decisions for the front of the book.

Demo book on the shelf: Blood Vow. Open it first so you can see a filled Decision Lab and a real Chapter 1 instead of an empty scaffold.

It looks the part too — ink, oxblood, velvet energy — but it’s a workspace, not a costume.

nk & Ruin is the front door for community beta:

1. No Windows/Mac install required — browser.
2. Hosted ghostwriting is off on purpose. You copy the brief into Claude / Grok / whatever you already use, then paste back.
3. Work saves in that browser on that device. Export if you care about the draft.

Before you open it

I’d rather say this up front:

1. It’s a manual / bring-your-own-AI beta. If you wanted “press button, full novel appears on my meter,” this isn’t that — and that’s intentional.
2. Best experience: finish Decision Lab → lock → use Copy brief for my AI → paste into your tool → paste prose back into Draft Studio.
3. Tell me where it breaks. Pretty is optional. Broken is useful.