How it started
The Misogi vow and where I stand now
The dare
Thirty days. One $100 Claude subscription. One novel — genuinely good, not AI slop.
That was the whole vow: stop intending, do one hard thing properly, and prove the machine could be used without losing the soul of the thing.
The vow is kept — and then some. What shipped was not a single spine but a press: a name, a library, a continuity engine, a craft body of knowledge, and Jakobus Swart — a man who turned out to be the answer to a question nobody had asked out loud.
What the month was really for (four goals)
| # | Goal | Vowed | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Evaluate the agent ecosystem — Cursor vs Claude; rules, hooks, skills | Pick a stack that doesn't flatten the work | Cursor → Claude Code; rules became skills, hooks, and a pre-commit gate |
| 2 | One non-slop novel — real literary craft, my voice intact | 1 finished book | 37 titles live on arjunabadger.press with read-online · EPUB · PDF · parallel translation editions rolling out — over a million words on the curated shelf |
| 3 | Portfolio-grade proof — discuss with an employer / CTO | A repo that demonstrates platform thinking | FSM continuity gate · NovelBench · cross-book Jakobus matrix · public Technology page |
| 4 | Understand LLMs deeply — limits, prompts not interchangeable | Show I know what I'm doing with models | Single-shot beats multi-pass (git-proven) · craft-nomenclature prompting · de-LLM loop · measurement harness |
What the month became
The scattered dare consolidated into Arjuna Badger Press — crest locked, library live on Render · Neon · R2, engine and showcase split by design so prose stays mine and the tooling stays honest.
Two surfaces now:
- The library — books first. Mission compact. Craft, places, and platform live off the shelf, not in its way.
- This annex — CV, letters, arms, the Misogi scorecard, and the prose that is not a book. Full transparency, ringfenced so the personal does not crowd the work.
The binding brief (for agents and future me) lives in the engine repo as docs/MISOGI.md. This page is the warm public version.
How the house pays for itself
Text is free. Every finished book stays on arjunabadger.press — read online, EPUB, PDF, no paywall. That is deliberate, not a placeholder.
Why not the big ebook stores? South Africa issues ISBNs free through the National Library — but the NLSA application site is broken, there is no working alternative, and buying commercial ISBNs for this catalogue is prohibitively expensive. Wide upload to Apple and the rest needs your own ISBNs. So the text ships here, free, out of spite if necessary.
Revenue = real human audiobooks. The business pivots to Arjuna Audio: paid audiobook editions narrated by local voice artists — the talent ACX and the usual royalty rails lock out. Not synthetic voice slop. Narrators get a transparent floor (≥5% of net profit for ≥5 years on qualifying projects) and can negotiate higher. Auditions are in for Resonance, The Calendar of Stone, and The Engineer of the Gods — cast pending, payday-gated. Die Vuur in die Donker (Winter sonder Einde, Book I) has a full audiobook pipeline live with Emma narrating in Afrikaans.
| What | Model |
|---|---|
| Ebook / PDF / read-online | Free on the press site |
| Human-narrated audiobook | Paid — artists share upside |
| Wide KDP / Apple / Kobo | On hold until ISBNs are sorted |
Where I stand now (2026-06-23)
Legend: ✅ Green — done or exceeded · 🟡 Amber — live or in progress; a gate still open · 🔴 Red — withheld, blocked, or do not proceed without a fix
| Objective | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Primary (1 good novel) | ✅ | Exceeded — 37 titles live, craft-guarded |
| Spirit (one genuinely hard thing) | ✅ | The month became integration, not output-chasing |
| Four goals (ecosystem · portfolio · LLM depth) | ✅ | Receipts in git and on the live site |
| The press (brand · site · deploy loop) | ✅ | arjunabadger.press on Render · sync_library → build → deploy |
| Personal annex | ✅ | Ringfenced CV, letters, arms, essays — including For G, the page for the man whose advice started the press |
| Library-first homepage | ✅ | Shelf front door · explore grid · press hub for platform detail |
| Cross-book continuity gate | ✅ | Jakobus + the Beast matrix · 0 errors at last run |
| Auth0 / platform login | ✅ | Live on arjunabadger.press — 5 social providers + email/passwordless |
| Winter sonder Einde — audiobook (Die Vuur in die Donker) | ✅ | Emma (ElevenLabs Afrikaans) · 19 sections · rendered and published 2026-06-23 |
| Audiobook cast (Resonance · Calendar · Engineer) | 🟡 | Auditions in · cast pending · payday-gated |
| The Long Silence | 🟡 | Scaffolded 2026-06-23 — full canon + prologue + ch-01 drafted · pipeline ready · nothing live yet |
| Winter sonder Einde (Die Vuur in die Donker) | ✅ | Book I: polished, all four gates passed · fully published 2026-06-23 (EPUB + PDF + audiobook) · Books II–V gated |
| Brave and Scared (Bloedrivier) | 🟡 | Movement I drafted · shipped as SERIAL · Zulu POV = gated empty seat (not author's alone to write) |
| NULL HORIZON (McKinnon) | 🔴 | Live to read — Movement I fact-checked — but do not contact Gary without fixes; Serpo-as-2001-discovery risk and living-portrait gates remain |
| The Unheard (Japan · Mongolia) | 🟡 | Drafts exported and now live on shelf — sensitivity read still binding before calling done |
| Henry Sugar | 🔴 | Manuscript live · no rich cover · withheld from full release until art ships |
| Translation editions | 🟡 | Resonance pilot live (af · zu · es · fr); catalogue rollout per edition map |
| Poes glossary | ✅ | Unflinching, sourced, 7-language edition live · companion Sky-Penis Files page shipped · Wikipedia submission open |
| "Done-done" on prose | 🟡 | de-LLM loop to green on at least the trilogy before calling any volume finished |
| The Felt and the Sky (Mongolia) | 🟡 | Draft-complete · exported · sensitivity read binding before pub-done |
| Wrath of Achilles (companion) | 🟡 | On shelf · classicist spot-read still open |
| Göbekli / The Belly Hill | 🟡 | Drafted · merge + backmatter pending |
| The Antifragile Reader (companion) | 🟡 | Scaffolded · read-online live · full draft pending |
| ISBN block (NLSA / wide ebook) | 🔴 | National Library site broken · no SA alternative · commercial ISBNs too expensive · text free on press site |
| Revenue model (Arjuna Audio) | 🟡 | Pivot locked: paid human-narrated audiobooks · local voice talent · narrator intake live |
| Wide store upload | 🔴 | On hold pending ISBNs |
| The road (the Beast, the fires, the promise) | 🟡 | Ahead, not behind — sunglasses off, sawubona, give where it costs |
What the $100 bought
A trilogy and its siblings — thirty-seven titles on the live shelf, over a million words in the curated corpus. A continuity engine that hard-gates fiction like production software. A self-editing loop that treats machine-tells as measurable defects. A publishing house with a face. A live reading site with parallel translation editions rolling out. An audiobook with a full Afrikaans production rendered and published, and three English cast auditions in. Text free on the site because the ISBN gate failed; revenue from human-narrated audiobooks and the local voice artists the big platforms exclude. A thesis for giving most of the money to the artist and the door away free to the unheard.
The subscription was the chisel. The discipline was mine.
Carry forward
Fearless about the craft; gentle with the maker. Sawubona — I see you. Aim true. Dig in.