Early in the project, I asked Claude how we should approach solving this problem. The solution was to externalise context into documents that could travell between conversations. The main document that was constructed for this purpose was the story bible.
The story bible was the master document that contained, in summary form, the world states for all ten stories, the central AI operational history that develops across them, recurring thematic threads, and an evolving Voice and Process Guide that compiled what each beat had taught the project about how these stories needed to be built. It also contained details of the characters in each story, its structure and the technique with which each was written. The bible started small and grew with every locked beat. This was the equivalent of version-control for the story ensuring that each change and departure from the initially approved outline was documented and incorporated in every direction within the outline. By the end of the project, it had reached its twenty-third revision.
At the end of each session, once the final version of a given story was locked, the details were entered into the story bible so that we were able to maintain a running record of every locked beat, its title, location, point-of-view characters, word count, and current version. This was the project's table of contents in progress. This was also the background that Claude needed to construct the opening prompt for the next story, drawing from the initially constructed story arc, the changes that are the result of how individual beats were updated and where the next story needs to go in the overall context of the demands of the overall narrative arc.
The session prompt for each new story was created based on this material and accompanied by the files needed to make it work. These usually included a drafting outline produced as the output of a brainstorming session between Claude and me on what direction the story should go - who the characters should be, what sort of a plot it should have, the narrative style in which it should be written and any storytelling device that would suit the outcome needed. Also important was one or two completed chapters that provided a tuning fork as to the voice that Claude should use while writing so that each story felt like it was written by the same author.