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.

inkos-short-writing

Short-fiction writing