2026-09-20
PLOT
Taavi Rask, a small-time art thief in postwar Baltimore, torches a warehouse to destroy evidence after a heist goes sideways. He’s convinced his fence, Dulce Ibarretxe, perished in the blaze. For months he’s haunted by phantom visions of her—bloody hands reaching for him in alleyways, her voice echoing in empty rooms. He drowns his guilt in rotgut whiskey, certain he’s responsible for her death. Then Dulce materializes at his usual booth, scarred but breathing. She’d escaped through a coal chute and went underground to evade both the syndicate and the cops. The hallucinations weren’t ghosts—they were withdrawal and conscience. Together they fence the stolen paintings they’d hidden, split the take, and vanish to separate coasts, finally free of the city that nearly consumed them both.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Lawless Person
- Action
- Becoming the victim of mistaken judgment in carrying out an enterprise
- Outcome
- Achieves success and happiness in a hard undertaking.
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#794
Mistaken Judgment
The protagonist supposes their ally is dead. The protagonist is astounded when their ally, whom they supposed to be dead, suddenly appears before them.
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#1344
Mystery
The protagonist has a delusion that they are haunted by the protagonist's friend. The protagonist believes that the protagonist's friend's blood is on their hands.
Hello, what is this?
Plottomatic is a daily plot machine designed to demonstrate a new and modernized version of Plotto, William Wallace Cook’s 1928 book and system for generating plots.
What's Plotto and why a modernized version?
William Wallace Cook was a prolific writer who created a strange and ingenious system for building plots: Plotto. I rewrote the manuscript to remove the antiquated 1928 discriminatory language while preserving the original structure and logic.
More info on making this: Plottomatic: rewriting a 1928 plot machine .
How does Plottomatic work?
Plottomatic walks through this new version of Plotto and chooses a protagonist, an action, and an outcome. Then it builds a series of dramatic situations that are chosen using the original Cook logic. Finally, it transforms the finished plot structure into a readable synopsis that adds characters, theme, and setting. That’s the daily plot you see above.
Are you making a new book or an app?
I’m glad you asked! Not yet – but wouldn't that be great? If you want more info, check out the project page and say hello.
Acknowledgements
William Wallace Cook wrote Plotto in 1928.
Gary Kacmarcik digitized the original book and created the original and foundational hyperlinked edition.
David Eyk created an XML version using Gary’s work and fixed some cross-reference links. I used this as the source file.
Pankaj Agarwal built a Flutter implementation that helped me shape the data model.
Lynn Cherny wrote an in-depth analysis of Plotto in 2018 that quantified the gender and race issues as well as other structural problems.