Bear In Chair Prompt Call April: god[desse]s and deities

The prompt call is CLOSED for prompts.

Your dear authorbear is reliably informed that the only dependable way to get words on the page is to plant self in chair with hands on writing implement and write. To that end, I am holding a prompt call.

The theme of this month's prompt call is god[desse]s and deities. Please leave prompts about characters, settings, plot elements, and such related to that theme. Prompt me for anyone from Amaterasu to Lakshmi to Yahweh to Zeus, with a specific myth or without one, or give me characteristics of a deity or a religious practice and expect me to make the rest up. I will write poems and short stories based on your prompts.

This is an exercise in crowdfunded creativity. An excellent way to inspire me to do a thing is to pay me to do it; if you like what you see and you want to see more, feed the bear.

There are several options for feeding the bear:

1) Sponsor the prompt call. I have a Paypal button for donations. The recommended minimum donation is $1, because Paypal takes a fee from every transaction. Any Dreamwidth user who donates (make sure you mention your username) will be added to my access list (where I try to post at-least-weekly excerpts from my works in progress). Anonymous donations are of course welcome, but cannot get that bonus.

If donations reach $25—I'd say keep an eye on the ticker, but apparently tickerfactory.com's images are all broken—I will post a sixty-six-line narrative poem; this month it will be "The Selkie Sisters and the Dryad".

2) Sponsor a story. Each story will have a price tag, using a semi-pro per-word rate, rounded down to the nearest dollar. A two-hundred-word prose story will cost $5, a two-thousand-word story $50, comparable to what Duotrope Digest assures me I would make by selling the story to a semiprofessional market. Similarly, a poem of up to ten lines will cost $5, of up to twenty-five lines $10, of up to forty lines $15, of up to sixty lines $20, and a longer poem, we'll talk. When you sponsor a story (prose or poetry), tell me which story you want to sponsor—every time I complete a story for the prompt call, I will comment to the prompter with the title, the medium, a brief summary, and the price—and I will immediately post it publicly to this journal, with your username listed as sponsor.

3) Spread the word. Link to this post from any social media, suggest that people come and leave prompts, and leave a comment saying you did so. If you link back and you leave prompts, your prompts go to the top of my to-write list. If I see a new prompter or donor (anonymous people, sadly, do not count), I will post a free story; this month it will be the poem "Serenity Prayer".

Whenever I write a story to one of your prompts, I will send you a private copy of the story, via Dreamwidth PM to logged-in prompters or email to anonymous prompters who give their email (anonymous prompters who do not leave contact information cannot get private copies of stories). Please do not share it with anyone.

At least one of the stories resulting from the prompt call will be posted for free, so y'all have a better idea of what you're getting into.

At the end of the prompt call, I will post a list of all the unsold stories, to simplify life for anyone looking to see if you might want to sponsor something.

This prompt call will last until the evening of Sunday, April 13 until I damn well feel like it is CLOSED. Fills will appear as soon as I can manage.

Leave your prompts here! This month's theme is god[desse]s and deities.

so there's this thing called the Writing Process Blog Tour

I was tagged by annathepiper, whose Writing Process post is here. The idea is, a bunch of writers talk about their writing process and tag writers who haven't been tagged to talk yet, and the rest of y'all follow the links and discover new writers.

What Am I Working On?

Today is Bear In Chair Prompt Call day, so I am working on whatever people tell me to work on! Beyond that, I have a distressing number of works in progress. Black Velvet Band Medley wants to be the frontburner project at the moment, but it requires more research and outlining: this is the one in which War On Drugs prisoners slated for prison labor on the Luna colony end up on a transport to set up the Tau Ceti colony instead and our heroes pull a La Amistad, and it's the one (a one?) addressing colonialism and the prison-labor loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment.

How Does My Work Differ From Others Of Its Genre?

Speculative fiction—media in general, but I'm particularly concerned with speculative fiction—is distressingly male, distressingly white, really distressingly straight, and it goes without saying that it's very nearly all cisgender. My work is, for the most part, none of the above.

Why Do I Write What I Do?

It distresses me that I and so many other people can't see ourselves reflected in the media. More to the point, it's wrong that we can't see our media reflections. I have a bumper sticker on my car: "Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture." —Allen Ginsberg. And as Junot Diaz says, "You know how vampires have no reflections in the mirror? If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves." I am taking back a little of that control and I am making some damn mirrors.

How Does My Writing Process Work?

Mostly I wing it. With Leah Far-Sighted and sequels I'm trying the snowflake method of outlining, but it isn't going so well. "Start at the beginning, write until you reach the end, and then stop" works much better for me, but it's not really a method designed to result in an intricately plotted novel. The one novel-length project that I've successfully completed using that method is a Harry Potter fanfic, which (since I spent much of it having my characters chase Horcruxes) essentially had the outline laid out for me. I'm trying to get better at outlining before writing.


If you wanna be tagged, holler.

ETA: First tag: perfectworry!

crossposted from conallpublications.com