Archive | October 2014
Dungeon Call Closes this Evening! (Eastern DST)
My Dungeons & Caves Call is still open! But only for the rest of today.
This prompt call is all about captured men, enslaved men, kidnapped men, submissive men, trapped men.
Leave a prompt, and I will write a micro/flash-fic. Tip, and I will write more words – 100 per $1US tipped.
(The cuffs are the tip jar)
And the more money donated, the more I’ll write.
At $25, T. & I get take-out. Thai, I think, though it may be Indian. Reached! (It turned out to be Chinese. Mmm, shrimp-fried rice).
at $40, I will commission a piece of character art from a crowdfunded artist Reached!
(I will wait to see which story is most popular before commissioning a piece. Right now, “A Rescue of Sorts” is winning 😉
At $50, I will write an extra fic for everyone. One prompter chosen at random will get an extra 500-word story. Reached! (I will write these once I’ve written all the original stories!)
At $75, three prompters chosen at random will get an extra 500-word story written to their prompt Reached! (I will write these once I’ve written all the original stories!)
We’re at $83 as of this posting! Thank you, everyone!
At $100, three more prompters chosen at random will get an extra 500-word story.
At $120, I get a rug for my cave!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/826868.html. You can comment here or there.
Other People’s Prompt Calls!!
The Artist Formerly Known as the Writer in my Attic, K Orion Fray (![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kissofjudas, is having a prompt call – here. The theme is “Ghosts and Spirits.”
Prompting is free; tips buy story continuations.
And, in ysabetwordsmith‘s Tuesday Fishbowl, she wrote “The Age of Reasons” to my prompt. It hasn’t been sponsored yet, but it’s a lovely poem!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/826580.html. You can comment here or there.
A proof, of sorts, a story for Thimbleful Thursday
Thimbleful Thursday is a new microfic prompt site (mine!). This week’s prompt was “Cut the Mustard” and the word limit was 500 (450-550).
This piece is 547 words, and it might soon become obvious what prompted it.
“You’re never going to be able to do it, you know.”
Shut up.
“You’re never going to make it. You’re just not good enough.”
Shut up!
“You might as well face it. There’s people who can do this sort of thing – and then there’s you.”
Shut Shut Shut UP!
“Why don’t you just give up?”
“Shut UP!”
There was some merit to the nay-sayers points, of course.
If there had been no merit, there would have been no sting – no bite, as it were. If they had simply been spitting into the wind, then they’d have been easy to ignore. But they weren’t, and thus they weren’t.
The truth was, Esharina had picked a challenge that was over her head. She’d done it on purpose, with her eyes open – although she might have gone a little further over her head than she’d planned.
(There were some that would say that everything was over her head. They weren’t worth mentioning, certainly not more than once.)
It was the sort of thing that you did when you were angry, when you had something to prove, when you were so far past winning that you had to carry your whole damn life on your shoulders, make up every failure twice over, just to not come out too far behind.
But none of that, not her failures, extensive as they had been, not her choice of a target, not her need to prove herself – not one of those things meant she couldn’t cut the mustard this time, and not one of those things meant that the nay-sayers’ commentary cut any less deeply.
“Shut UP! Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Esharina glared around the barracks. “One, it’s stupid. Two, I know that Connron and Torg and Ellory failed. I know Marchiella and Red Dav never game back. I’ve seen Caslior’s skull, thank you very much. I drank at the funerals. I pitched in, when appropriate, for the widows, the orphans, and so on. I know that better mercs than me have failed. But that is, as they say, wheat from a different bag.” She looked around the room, glaring at each merc in turn. Mercs did not, per se, have friends. But they had working relationships, and she had fought at the side of every single one of these fighters.
“I know I can do this. Not because I’m better than them, but because I’m different. I’m not as strong as Connron. I’m not as tough as Red Dav. I’m probably not as clever as Torg or Caslior. But I can do this.” She let her eyes drop back to the slim pack in front of her. “I know I can do this, and if I’m wrong, nobody but me is gonna pay the price.” When she looked up, it was directly at Senner, who served as the captain of their unit. “And I’d appreciate a little bit of cheering, and less grousing.”
Senner cleared her throat. “We hear you, Esha. And… we’ve got your back. We’ll ride you to the line.”
Esha didn’t miss the glare that Senner shot around the room, daring anyone to argue with her. She didn’t mind it, either. “Thanks. Thanks… I just know I can do it, this time.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/826241.html. You can comment here or there.
Adventures in Cooking
Yesterday, I learned:
That porchetta is a food item (Wikipedia says it is “a savoury, fatty, and moist boneless pork roast of Italian culinary tradition”). It is also a food item that our local grocery store sells.
That pancetta is a food item. (Wikipedia says that is is “is Italian bacon made of pork belly meat that is salt cured and spiced with black pepper and sometimes other spices”).
That my husband’s handwriting can make pancetta look exactly like porcetta (it’s that a-n) and that I should really check the list in the evening, before I go to the grocery store at 8:30 a.m.
That the recipe I want to make later this week calls for pancetta, not porchetta.
And that porchetta is very tasty, and very different from pancetta.
Time to hit the local butcher’s!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/825731.html. You can comment here or there.
Scrum Wednesday Morning
Work has been doing a scrum-style meeting every morning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)) for admin, so I thought I’d do something similar for me.
So, Yesterday I:
* Worked 8 hours, including a grocery run in the a.m. (which is also my home grocery shopping).
* Wrote 1168 words, including on two commissions and the giraffe call
* with T., stacked one wagonload (like this) of firewood
* took a 25-minute walk.
* oh, and did the cat litter
I found myself tired after work, so took after-dinner as a break-night and watched Dollhouse.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/825538.html. You can comment here or there.
Jumping Rings: A Story of the Circled Plain – Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight: Valran
Come
“Come.”
The female voice, again. Valran didn’t move.
“Come, Valran Servus. I am buying you.”
He risked looking up, now. It didn’t seem like the wisest idea, but there was something about her voice that demanded attention. So up Valran looked, into eyes like amber.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/825317.html. You can comment here or there.
Natural Prey
Eamon had made his share of enemies in four years at Addergoole.
Everyone did, he supposed. Everyone got in somebody’s way, everyone pissed someone off. He liked to think that he’d done right, at least. He’d made the bad guys angry, made almost all of the really bad ones somewhere between furious and spitting mad, and generally protected the small, the weak, and those who didn’t know better yet. But that didn’t make him any fewer enemies – that just made the ones he had stronger and more ruthless.
He watched his back his first year out of school. It was 2012, so there was a lot of watching to do, anyway. Watch out for the army, watch out for the monster-hunters. Watch out for the monsters, in at least three varieties. Help who you can.
He was actually pretty good at helping people, too. He was naturally gregarious and made more so by his Change; people liked him. He was a nice puppy. Big, friendly, affable, and nobody really thought too much about how big he was when he was helping them out of a jam. He made a bit of a name for himself – helping people out of difficult situations, playing fireman or EMT or whatever and then moving on while people were still grateful. It was, he hated to admit, fun. People liked him.
By the time he woke up with a splitting headache, he’d actually forgotten all about watching his back from school enemies, and he’d almost forgotten about watching out for the other threats. The world was done ending. It had been a few years.
And he was staring up at someone straddling him, trying desperately to remember how he’d gotten here – and why she was smiling.
My Dungeon & Cave Call is open!
If you’d like to see more of this story, there is SO MUCH more to tell. Just drop a tip in the the tip handcuffs:
Written to kissofjudas‘s prompt
Eamon is a Year 14 Addergoole Student. This is his first appearance.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/824918.html. You can comment here or there.
The Rescue? Continues? – a continuation for the Giraffe Call
Previous: A Rescue, of Sorts
Daxton had dealt with mercenaries before – there had been the month of assassination attempts, and then there had been the border skirmishes, since his father’s Duchy butted up again the Red Queen’s land. He had learned, unpleasantly but quickly, that you did what you were told by the people in armor, or, Duke’s son or not, they made certain you did what they wanted. He fell quiet and held still.
“This’ll just take a minute.” She pulled a leather roll from her belt and, from there, pulled a set of tiny tools. “Just hold still…” One slim tool went into the key-hole of Daxton’s shackles, followed by another, this one at an angle. “Hold still…” Daxton hadn’t moved, but, then again, she wasn’t looking at him, she was looking at her work.
Three clicks later, the shackles had released. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.” He was fairly certain he could, at least. “But-“
“Hsst, come on.” She hauled him to his feet and shoved her shoulder under his arm. “We’ve got to get out of here before – well, we’ve got to get out of here.”
He couldn’t very well let her go back to his father and tell the Duke that his son had refused to leave the Red Queen’s dungeon. “Very well. I can walk…”
“And I can support you. You’re a year’s wages on legs, man, come on. I expected this.”
It turned out that “I can walk” was slightly more of an exaggeration than Daxton had believed, but, luckily, he supposed, the mercenary’s claim that she could support him was completely true. They headed out of the dungeon, the hair on the back of Daxton’s neck prickling.
They were moving quietly, but slowly. Daxton was sure that at any moment, the Red Queen’s guards would jump out and resc- and capture him back. He’d feel bad about the nice mercenary woman, of course, but she’d known it was a high-risk job. Dukes do not give out rewards like the one Daxton’s father was reportedly offering for cakewalks.
“Almost there. Hsst, gotta hold yourself for a moment. Can you do that?”
“Where… yes.” They were in a dusty, musty corner of the white-stone castle. He hadn’t seen much of the place in his captivity, but he was pretty sure that nobody had seen this room in years, possibly decades. Certainly nobody with a mop.
It had some old papers, a lot of mud – and most importantly, a door. It looked stuck; the mercenary leaned heavily on it, shoving it one finger-width at a time.
The guards were going to be here any minute. They were going to hear the soft scrape of the door on the wood, or follow some trail or some track. They couldn’t just lose him. Could they?
And they’d put an arrow through her, right off, but if the Red Queen was telling the truth, they’d make sure to only cripple her. She liked thieves to die slowly, very slowly.
“Can you hurry a little?”
“If I hurry, it makes noise. It makes noise…”
“Okay. Okay. Quiet is good.” He leaned against a wall. The guards would find him. Nobody had even got as far as the dungeon before. He wasn’t even sure the stories the Red Queen told him were true. But if they did find him – if they didn’t find him –
“There. Come on, the horses are right outside.”
“This is insane.” He hobbled through the narrow opening into a courtyard as disused as the room had been. “How did you-“
“I do my prep work. Here.” She dropped to her knees and gave him a leg up into the saddle. Daxton found that muscle memory took over, even if his strength was lacking. “Now, now is the time where we have to really run.” She mounted her own horse much more quickly, grabbed the reins to Daxton’s horse, and, in a moment, they were bent down over their mounts’ necks as they sped towards the border.
They were really leaving. They were really going home. Daxton closed his eyes and concentrated on not falling off. They were really out of the Red Queen’s palace. He squeezed his eyes a little tighter and clutched the pommel.
The mercenary didn’t stop them until they were up in the foothills, past the Red Queen’s territory and almost to Daxton’s father’s duchy. A tiny hunting cabin stood waiting for them. “You can clean up here, and rest. We’ll go back to your father in the morning, and I can collect my reward.”
Her reward. Daxton swallowed. “I really appreciate all the trouble you went to, but I-“
“-have as much interest in rutting as you do in learning how to be a pig farmer. I know.”
“You… what?” Daxton gaped at her.
“I do my prep work. And my research.”
“But my father offered my hand in marriage to the merc – or woman of the merc’s choice – that rescued me.” He could, he supposed, run back to the Red Queen’s dungeon. But that would be pretty obvious.
“So?” The mercenary grinned at him. “You’re not the only one who’d rather do anything else than rut.”
My Dungeon & Cave Call is open!
If you want more of this story – and there is still more just dying to be written – drop a tip in, ah, the tip handcuffs:
This story written as ysabetwordsmith‘s commissioned continuation
Next: Probably a Rescue.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/824624.html. You can comment here or there.
Other Duties As Needed, a story for the Giraffe Call
“Miss Myers, when you I said I was willing to do anything…” Danny wiped sweat from his brow. He should just shut up. He kept talking. “I suppose the tone of your voice led me to think that, maybe, since you were looking for a ‘personal assistant’ and it was going to be work in my degree field…”
“You thought perhaps the work would either be sexual or related to business. I understand.” Lilliam Myers sat down on stone wall with a practiced skirt-smoothing gesture that did not help Danny’s concentration. She was fifteen years older than him and a thousand times richer and more successful. And he worked for her, and she was talking about sex. “You weren’t expecting to be laying walls and mowing my lawn. It doesn’t appear to be forwarding your position any, am I right?”
“Exactly.” He picked up another brick and slotted it into place.
“But you did say you’d be willing to do anything.”
“I’m doing it, I’m doing it. It’s just – “
“Not what you expected.” She was laughing at him, wasn’t she? He should have stayed quiet. He should shut up now.
“Not really, no.”
“So what you want is the ability to climb in society, not to build the walls that holds society’s lawns together. But in reality, all that we do is build walls for other people to sit on.”
Danny finally listened to his inner voice and shut up.
“We do a lot of dirty work. Yesterday, while you were working on the bushes, I know you heard the entire conversation between Mr. Donaldson and myself.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He hadn’t known that she’d noticed him.
“And did you learn anything?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There will be a quiz later. For now, go use the bathroom next to my bedroom and clean up. The wall will still be here tomorrow… and, in a couple hours, we have a charity ball to go to.”
“In a…” The look in her face was unmistakable. “Yes, ma’am!”
My Dungeon & Cave Call is open!
If you’d like to see more of this story, I bet there’s more to be written. Just drop a tip in the the tip handcuffs:
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/824469.html. You can comment here or there.