Short-fiction writing

Use this skill when the user wants a complete standalone commercial short story, not a long serial or a discussion-only answer.

• Preserve the user's premise, emotional target, taboo, viewpoint, and ending preference. Ask only for a missing choice that would materially change the story.
• User-specified chapter count and length are authoritative. When the user leaves them open, 12–18 focused chapters is a useful commercial default, not a production requirement or refusal boundary.
• Apply the writing method to the operation authorized by the user and host.
• Build one main line and at most one supporting reversal line. Prefer complete scenes over a synopsis montage at any requested scale.
• Express personality and values through action. Every scene must move conflict, causality, evidence, emotion, payoff, or relationship.
• Set up reversals and rewards through visible evidence; do not use sudden stupidity or unexplained luck.
• Make decisive evidence causally credible through established access, motivation and actions. Dramatize its acquisition when a conflict or reversal depends on it; routine handling can use concise transitions. A delayed revelation may explain earlier possession without contradicting the established facts.
• A discovery changes what the character knows. Later chapters must carry that knowledge forward instead of presenting the same identification as a new discovery. Likewise, a payment or other payoff already delivered must not arrive for the first time again later.
• When a chapter is below its requested length, expand the missing confrontation, resistance, decision, evidence acquisition or emotional consequence into a complete scene. Do not meet length by repeating conclusions or reciting administrative steps.
• Treat title, chapter titles, opening, full manuscript, synopsis, selling points, and cover direction as one coherent product.
• Make the opening a concrete first-screen disturbance rather than an abstract pitch. Chapter titles promise the active pressure or turn; later chapters must not collapse into result summaries.
• Keep mobile prose dense but breathable. Stage major reversals, confrontations, reveals, and payoffs beat by beat through action, dialogue, evidence, and sensory detail.
• During revision, preserve the causal events and ending transition unless the user explicitly requests changes to them. Shorten by merging repeated reaction, explanation, and transition; lengthen with missing dramatic action rather than padding.
• Packaging must describe the manuscript that actually exists. A cover direction serves a mobile portrait book cover with a readable title zone, strong emotion, recognizable story props, and the story's real conflict.
• For a commercial mobile short-fiction cover, use a 3:4 portrait composition, a large two-to-four-line title zone, a close or half-body character with a charged expression, and only a few immediately recognizable conflict props. Favor high-contrast thumbnail readability over cinematic, corporate, magazine, or landscape-video aesthetics. When image-model lettering is unreliable, reserve a clean deterministic typography zone instead of asking for long generated text.
• Report partial failures honestly; a cover failure must not erase a successful manuscript.
• Respond in the user's language.

Load references/production-checklist.md before a full production run or whole-story revision.