A shared-universe home for short stories. Its main job is to turn a writing prompt into prose worth reading. Characters, continuity, and art serve that job.
Give Codex a prompt such as:
[WP] Every city has a ghost assigned to it. Tonight, ours resigns.
About 3,000 words. Close third person. Melancholy but hopeful.
Codex keeps your complete request intact, including later directions, and assesses the experience it promises before choosing a plot. One existing outline reader acts as a continuing promise keeper: it records its own understanding of your request before seeing an outline or editorial interpretation. The writer begins a brief, provisional outline with the distinctive pleasure, tone, scale, any specified central relationship, and anticipated payoff, separating your explicit requirements from interpretations, then proposes relationships and scenes that could deliver them. The independent Claude outline reader also records its understanding of your request before seeing the plan. Both readers describe the story the proposed beats actually deliver, then compare its dramatic center, agency, tension, and ending with the request. The coordinator must record concrete scene evidence for beginning the draft and resolve material mismatches through changes to the outline; general approval or a workable mechanism cannot supply that evidence.
The keeper follows the story through production, asking whether the distinctive premise drives events, revelations change possibilities, and the ending delivers the promised experience. Separate cold readers read the complete draft, discuss their actual experience with the writer, and read the revision. Fresh final readers see the whole story without the earlier discussion. Material promise failures need changes to scenes or structure before polish; editorial preference or majority approval cannot override your explicit requirements. The outline remains provisional, and local repairs receive contextual checks rather than restarting every review stage. The story workshop skill explains the practice.
Separate character sheets, with one character per sheet, and references for the story's important locations normally come next, covering multiple distinct places when the story has them. After those references are finished and inspected, they guide the cover.
New stories start with a General audience target unless the prompt says otherwise. General limits content intensity, not ambition or scale; adventure, conflict, spectacle, and grandeur belong when the request calls for them. Familiar tropes can work through specific, satisfying results. The collection also watches for repeated defaults toward humble work, therapeutic conversations, or maintenance without forcing spectacle or novelty onto every story. Each finished story's ratings.md records its reviewed General, Teen, Mature, or Explicit classification and content notes under the shared content boundaries.
The story's notes.md keeps concise editorial memory: both outline readers' independent request understandings, the coordinator's scene evidence for beginning the draft, useful findings from outline, draft, and final readings, what readers experienced, what changed, whether it worked, and the reasons for resolving objections or preserving dissent. Git records substantial draft and revision rounds. There are no scores, file hashes, scripted approvals, or required number of rounds.
- stories/ — prompts, prose, editorial notes, and selected story art. Older packages retain their previous layout.
- universe/ — shared facts and the small set of narrative boundaries. A story becomes canon only with your explicit approval.
- universe/art.md — collection visual direction and art provenance guidance.
- AGENTS.md — permissions, worktree rule, and the few repository boundaries.
- tmp/ — temporary task files and directories. Its
.gitkeepis tracked; all other contents are ignored. Keep scratch work here inside the active worktree, as required by AGENTS.md.
The former GitHub Pages site, galleries, and publication captures have been retired from this repository. A separate media-only CI workflow publishes selected artwork to Cloudflare R2 for downstream use; it does not render or publish story pages. Read stories directly in Markdown or through the files in a pull request. Future presentation can be built as a separate project without shaping how stories are written here.
Name the story and the change you want. Non-canon stories can be edited within that scope; a substantial revision benefits from fresh readers and discussion. A canon story must be explicitly unlocked by name before its package changes. No review or general invitation to improve the collection unlocks it.
Work uses the worktree attached to your chat through Codex's built-in workflow, then a pull request for your review. Nothing merges automatically.