November 2025.
In the previous episode, I sat down in front of an empty project, my copilot Claude Code by my side, with no idea what I was getting myself into. A few months later, I knew. My little personal tool had grown up. A lot. Too much, some would say.
Here’s how you go from a card manager to a monster.
The reasonable beginning
At the start, the ambition was modest. I wanted to copy what Scrivener did well: a tree structure to organize my novel, and a text editor to write in. The foundation, basically. Nothing crazy.
And for about five minutes, I stayed reasonable.
The spark of madness: what if the AI read for me?
The trouble is, I love artificial intelligence. I’m a SillyTavern user, I love chatting with characters, playing with personas, seeing what these models are made of. So naturally, a little voice whispered to me: “what if you added a layer of AI?”
But right away, one rule imposed itself on me, non-negotiable. The AI, in my tool, was never to write in my place. Never. Not one sentence of prose. It would be there to assist, not to replace. My pen stays mine. It was obvious, almost a moral principle, and without knowing it I was laying the cornerstone of everything that would follow.
What remained was figuring out what this AI would do that was useful, if it wasn’t writing.
And that’s when my nature took over again. Because I have to confess something to you: like a lot of programmers, I’m lazy. An efficient lazy person, which isn’t the same thing. I like things to be well thought out so I don’t have to rack my brain later. I’m always looking for the method that’ll save me time in the long run, even if it means investing a lot up front.
Bill Gates would have put it better than me:
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
Bill Gates
So I had my brilliant lazy-person idea. It’s all already in my text, right? The characters, the places, the events, it’s all there, written in black and white. What if, in a single click, the AI read my manuscript and automatically generated my character sheets, my location sheets, the events, the lorebook? What if I could even chat with my own characters, to test their consistency?
The real challenge, the one that kept me awake, was making sure that a single analysis of my text fed the whole software at once. Not just one sheet here. No. The sheets, the timeline, the links between characters, everything, powered by the same reading. A brain that tidies the whole house in one pass.
And that’s when reasonable jumped ship for good.
“Oh hey, that’s neat. Let’s add it.”
The trouble, when you start building your own tool, is that you never have enough.
Really, never. The moment I stumbled on something cool somewhere, the same little phrase came back: “why not?”. One day, completely by chance, I came across a site offering 3D timelines. I liked it. And you know what? Boom, let’s add it. A three-dimensional timeline to navigate my three thousand years of history.
Then a constellation of links between characters. Then a calendar to manage the time of my imaginary world. Then, then, then. Each feature called for another. My card manager had turned, almost without my noticing, into a real writing factory.
I always had plenty of ideas. I still do, for that matter. But at some point, you have to know when to stop. Or at least, learn how to, because I’m still not sure I can manage it.
The christening
By dint of growing, this thing deserved a name. I won’t lie to you with some pretty branding story mulled over for weeks. The truth is far dumber.
That night, I was watching the series Grimm. And there it was. Le Grimoire. Right there, before my eyes, obvious. A book of knowledge, of creatures, of worlds. A grimoire to hold mine. The name stuck.
Sometimes the best decisions are the dumbest ones.
The flip side of the coin
But there’s one thing I talk about less willingly. Through all those months of creative intoxication, adding features and polishing my tool into the small hours, one little voice never let go of me. Guilt.
Because I wasn’t writing anymore.
Do you get the irony? I’d started building this tool with one single goal: to write my novel. To tame my three-thousand-year universe, to hold my voices, to organize my chaos. And now the tool meant to make me write was keeping me from writing, devouring all my time. The means had eaten the end.
My novel slept while I coded its cradle. Aster, Raven, all my characters waited patiently in files, while I spent my evenings on a 3D timeline that, let’s be honest, they couldn’t have cared less about.
It was exhilarating. And a little painful. Both at once.
I was going to have to decide: did this thing stay my little personal toy, or did it become something else? The answer, and the decision that changed everything, will be for the next episode.