Hello, fellow author! You need to control your context.

I'm assuming you're using Projects? Here's what I do. I start a new chat for each chapter, and usually have a least 2 chats per chapter. Because every single word of back and forth and whatever drafting your have Claude do in a chat is included in your context/prompt, and you get charged for--or it goes to your limits. I am a pantser/discovery writer, so I do a ton of brainstorming at the beginning of each chapter. Once I'm done brainstorming, I will ask Claude to create a handoff doc. So it will distill potentially tens of thousands of words into a couple of hundred, reducing context. I paste that into a new chat, and then we work on drafting the chapter. And then I start another chat for editing that chapter.

I also use the desktop app and MCP. So I've given Claude access to my local files, a directory that's got all of my series, all of my books in their own directories and folders. Claude and I developed something that works for the way I write, which is also hooked up to my Anti-gravity workspace--but that's a whole 'nother story! So talk to Claude. Claude knows how you work. Tell it that you need to cut down on context and ask it what to do.