Ticking Clock

What It Does

Identifies temporal deadlines ("before midnight," "three days left," "race against time") and checks whether urgency is maintained in the text following the deadline. Flags "abandoned deadlines" where the ticking clock is set but then forgotten.

Why It Matters

Deadlines are one of the strongest tools for generating narrative urgency. "You have until midnight" instantly raises the stakes. But if the chapter after the deadline is a leisurely description of the countryside, the reader feels the disconnect. Once a clock starts ticking, the prose should reflect the pressure — through urgency words, shorter sentences, or re-referencing the deadline.

What Gets Flagged

Abandoned Deadlines

Severity: Information

Example (flagged):

Ticking clock: "until midnight" is set here but urgency fades — the deadline may feel forgotten

Why: A deadline was introduced (e.g., "They had until midnight to find the artifact") but the following text has very low urgency density (<5% of lines) and doesn't re-reference the deadline.

Deadline Patterns Detected

Category	Examples
Time-bound	"before midnight," "by dawn," "until morning"
Countdown	"hours left," "days remaining," "minutes left"
Urgency idioms	"time's running out," "race against time," "countdown"
Quantity-bound	"only have three hours," "deadline"

Urgency Maintenance

The analyzer checks a window following each deadline for urgency reinforcement words: "hurry," "rush," "clock," "tick," "quickly," "running out," "too late," "last chance," "now or never."

If both urgency density is below 5% AND the deadline phrase isn't re-referenced, the deadline is considered abandoned.

Configuration

No configuration options.

Technical Details

• Source: prose-craft
• Scope: Document-level (analyzes text window after each deadline)
• Minimum text: 10 lines
• Method: Regex for deadline introduction; urgency density calculation in following window (up to 1/3 of document length)