Project Brennan

History #

I started work on Project Brennan back in 2024. Since the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, my partner had started a new career publishing her own books online. She’s steadily been building a name for herself, and since the genre she wrote in was short romance novels, she rapidly got above 50 books!

Many of these books were set in the same shared world, and continuity became an appreciable burden. Moreso for romance, where each book deals with a couple getting together, but you also want to entice readers to read the next and previous books in the series, so you intertwine the characters via familial connections. In the early days this was done haphazardly as she was learning, and later became a little more formalised.

Since I had started to play with local LLMs on a 128GB M1 Mac Studio, I wondered whether we could get the models to read the book, and compile a list of characters for us. Given the context limits of 4-8k tokens of the era, my partner’s short stories had chapters just about fit the windows, and allowed for output.

This started my journey to create a knowledge graph system for reading books.