I built a custom Ghost theme so I could ship a fantasy novel the way I wanted to

I'm a hobbyist novelist working on a fantasy series called Edhra Chronicles. I'm not trying to make a living from it — I have a day job — but I wanted the website to be properly mine.

So I built a custom Ghost theme from scratch. Three months in.

The release model I'm aiming at is a bit unusual: chapters aren't serialized. The full first book ships when chapter 100 is done. Free tier covers chapters 1–3 plus all the wiki articles (worldbuilding pieces, ~108 planned). Paid tier ($6/month or $50/year) unlocks the rest of the book and future books. No Amazon yet. No Substack — I tried that and bounced off it hard.

The theme is called Myth. It's at v2.14.1 in production right now. The pieces I'm proudest of:

- An interactive map of the Shifting Coast. 4K parchment image (Firefly-generated), JSON pin registry, hover cards on each location, URL state so links to specific pins work. Eight pins live so far.

- A wiki article system with proper category navigation, hover cards on internal links, and a spoiler-free tier separate from the chapters.

- A custom Python audit script that runs on every wiki article before I publish it — checks spelling against an in-world vocab whitelist, flags overlong sentences, catches spoilers from a forbidden-terms list. Exit 0 = clean, Exit 1 = stop and fix.

I'm 35 wiki articles deep, four chapters drafted, one free novella shipped to seed the audience. The novella is called The Hundred. The wiki is at edhrachronicles.com.

The reason I'm posting: most of the indie writing tooling out there is either Substack-shaped (newsletter-first, which doesn't fit) or Wattpad-shaped (chapter-by-chapter community, which also doesn't fit). I ended up building because nothing off the shelf supported the model I wanted. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Anyone else here built unusual tooling for a creative project? What did you wish existed that didn't?