So you think it’s great I’m doing a prompt call, but you want a little more from my stories this time.
How do you get more words?
There’s a few ways!
a) Get someone else to prompt! New eyes are my friends.
b) Comment (a substantive comment: more than i like this, though essays are not required. Telling me something you liked is a good way to do this!) The first two stories to get 5+ comments (And then the first 2 to get 7+ and so on…) will get an extension.
c) Work on my wiki – http://wiki.lynthornealder.com ! The normal offer is “three posts on a setting for a fic about that setting”.
For the purposes of this call, any page you create and complete will count as one extension to one Squash Story, within limits. *
c) Tell me to write something else. I know it’s counter-intuitive, but if you pick something from the list below (one thing, or, if the thing is non-writing, one non-writing and one writing thing), I will also write an extension to the story of your choice, or a second prompt.
You can ask me what any of these are – those I’ve already written up an explanation for can be found here: http://www.lynthornealder.com/writing/current-projects/
(Shown with the date last worked on)
Things with 💾, 🎨 or 🚶♀️ are non-writing
Commission 22-Jun
Petrov
Thimbleful Posts 💾
TootFic 29-Aug
Helpers 8-Sep
Thimbleful 15-Sep
Cyyaaa 17-Sep
Map 🎨17-Sep
Saving the Cult 17-Sep
misc 18-Sep
The Bellamy 22-Sep
Story for B 23-Sep
Nathaen 23-Sep
F.I.B. M.A.D. 23-Sep
Blog Post 23-Sep
Preptober
r/writingprompts 24-Sep
Old War, New School 25-Sep
sort files 28-Sep
Nano Prep 28-Sep
Streeetch 🚶♀️ 29-Sep
Purchase Negotiation 29-Sep
mm werewoif 30-Sep
Teacher Search 30-Sep
PSI Team 5-Oct
Patreon 6-Oct
30 days of Leo’s Hair 6-Oct
Cloverleaf 7-Oct
Prompt Call 7-Oct
Leo is a Sword 7-Oct
* Limits on the wiki page extension – if the page is simply: Dolores Colchinny – serving Twelve sequential 25-year-sentences without possibility of parole for first-degree murder and then another ten years for felony theft – first appears (link) – I may ask you to make two of those for the same extension. But something as complete as http://wiki.lynthornealder.com/index.php?title=Bellamy may get you two extensions. So the sweet spot is – http://wiki.lynthornealder.com/index.php?title=Eleanor_Kennedy, which also serves as a decent character page template. )
(note on the above note: Characters who show up in a single flash fiction are the least important to get wiki pages. Which is why I used her there as an example. )
Muzzled:
In Avrox, everyone wears face coverings that obscure their noses, their mouths, their chins. Some are pretty, light, diaphanous; some are made of leather that fit the face; some are metal.
Nobody told Toph any of this before he visited the city, and now he’s found himself in a mess of trouble – and being sold to cover the fine for his crime – all for going without his face covered.
Why are the Avrox so intent on their damn muzzles anyway?
https://www.patreon.com/posts/picrew-36315137
Nathaen:
It was a one night stand that left Nathen feeling pretty lukewarm. Great sex.. that was it.
Except, well.
Nathen wasn’t alone in his head, or in his body, and his “brothers” had other opinions about that one night stand.
And, on top of that, he kept running into the guy.
First at the same bar, over and over again.
And then – then on TV, fighting the monsters that were taking over the planet.
And then he rescued Nathen when one of his brothers got him into some trouble.
And again when Nathen got between a screaming mob and a young woman.
By the time Nathen could rescue the guy in return, it was almost a relief.
But, of course, by that time he should’ve known it was never going to end there.
Streeetch & Saving the Cult.
Thank you for the links! What’s Inheritance?
Ooh that one is a fanfiction!
Severus Snape was dying, something that came as not at all of a surprise and something of a relief.
He was dying *free*, something he’d never really thought he’d manage to do, not since that day back when he was young(er) and stupid(er).
And then the last piece of Albus Dumbledore’s legacy – oh, Merlin’s beard, let it be the last! – came into play, and Severus was no longer dying.
Nor was he free anymore.
Neville/severus, which is a weird pairing, but I’d read so many BAD attempts at Harry/Slave!severus that I wanted to try to do something good.
Ah, alas, I don’t know enough about HP to know why that’s weird beyond being teacher & student.
What’s 8 Page Lease? (How many of these will you let me get away with asking for descriptions of?)
(I was planning on writing descriptions for all of them eventually, so…. one at a time? )
8 page lease: title comes from a lease we once had for an apartment which was clearly written from the idea of “they have had too much stuff happen to them as landlords.”
In this case, it’s a Keeper who serially keeps-and-releases kept from slave markets – and the things she never thought she’d have to add.
Is part of this story published? If so, link please?
So … not entirely unlike Cya, but different context? Is this the agreement with the market, the agreement with / orders for the newly acquired Kept, or the agreement with the Kept being released?
The standard lease around here (written by the state association of real estate agents, IIRC) runs to about that many pages, a large chunk of which could be condensed to “be considerate of your landlord and your fellow tenants” (if humans could be relied to actually think about that and more or less agree on what it should included), and another large chunk of which is variations on “if [X] goes wrong such that one party or the other isn’t getting what they expect out of the lease, here’s how to complain and what the resolution options are”.
What’s Helpers?
Wrote this one up a little neater:
8 page lease:
title comes from a lease we once had for an apartment which was clearly written from the idea of “they have had too much stuff happen to them as landlords.”
Fae apoc, in the near post-apoc
She had started buying Kept [other fae, who were required by contract-with-the-universe to obey her] when she learned that there was a slave market nearby. She had started with only one or two orders, stuff she thought was important.
She ended up with the equivalent of an 8-page lease.
I’m suggesting commissions, since I still have one outstanding ;’)
Good call! 😀 I have not forgotten, I promise.
Re. 8-page Lease, nothing published yet!
So I forgot about this – but this means I can pick an extension to the story of my choice? (From the Gone Fishin’ prompts, I suppose?)
Yup! There’s a list with links (and indicators of what’s already getting an extension for comment count) at http://www.lynthornealder.com/2020/08/14/the-august-fishy-call/
I do believe the indicators are about one comment each out of update, but very close to accurate. (I’ve been sick all week)
No fun! I hope you’re feeling better soon.
Also that reminds me I managed to finish a somewhat of a follow up for the Scheffer?? one and then.. didn’t post it, blah.
Doing that now.
@Kelkyag (I gotta fix the threading on this thing to thread deeper……)
8-Page Lease: similar idea to Cya, but with .. uh.. .less planning ahead. Agreement is part of the Kept’s orders, in this case.
I’ve had half-page leases and then there was this thing, which included not pouring caustic chemicals down the toilet on one end and not having any color but white in the blinds on the other hand.
~*~
Helpers:
Riffing off the second half of Mr. Rogers’ “look for the Helpers” (For grown ups: Be the helpers.)
Fae Apoc, and the world is ending. “Someone ought to do something. People are dying,” says one member of a crew.
They share a three-pronged look.
“Oh. That’s us, isn’t it?”
Three young 20-somethings doing their best to rescue as many people as possible as the elder fae destroy their city.
Involves flying, taking over a sanitarium, some repossession of property…
Threading’s tricky. Naive ways to code & store threaded comments are fine for small comment trees, but turn into vast numbers of database lookups as trees get large and/or deep. One can do better, but it requires forethought and converting existing data is likely to be a pain.
Not having any color but white in the blinds sounds like an unpleasant HOA rule. The caustic chemicals thing is pretty reasonable and one’d hope one didn’t have to explicitly spell everything out like that but … humans.
They sound like good kids. 🙂
How about “Painting the Prison” for the next WIP description? (“It’s a pleasant prison, now, but it’s still a prison.”)
re. the blinds, this was an apartment complex (lots of grad students), and I think they were trying to maintain A Look, but yeah, that was very annoying.
Turns out WordPress has an option for up to 10 deep in the threading, so I turned it on.
OH yeah, Painting the prison. Half-asleep now, leaving this window open and will try to do that one tomorrow morning.
But I’ll tell you it’s another HP-verse fanfic, so if you want to pick a different one, that’s cool too!
You said one at a time. I’ll ask you about all of them eventually if you don’t tell me to cut it out first, and encourage you to put up a page (or three) of active WIPs, inactive-but-not-forgotten WIPs, and maybe stalled/wedged/don’t-bug-me-about-that-now/abandoned WIPs. Then I will know what I’m rooting for when you post lists like this. 🙂
Oh, right, another problem with deeply nested comments is displaying them, when the most common convention for distinguishing what’s replying to what is indent depth. Eventually everything is squished to the right margin and a pain to read.
Oh yeah, I remember that from DW/LJ when things would get heated! That is, the squishing. I should not have chosen to reply to this in the dashboard, it only shows me a few.
Oh, if you’re interested in Masto at any time, I can get you an invite code for wandering.shop, which is a pretty mellow group of people. It’s not heavily moderated at all, but it’s comfy.
(this thought brought to you because I’d been doing something like this as the hashtag #ThorneTales)
So I am tidying these up in a doc to post on a web page.
would you suggest: alphabetically, by category (fanfic, short piece, longrunning piece, non-writing), some other way?
Also, I have
Muzzled
Nathaen
inheritance
8 page Lease
Helpers
Paint the Prison
does that sound like I got everything?
That’s all the ones in this thread, except that I mangled what you listed as “Inherited” to “inheritance”, so you may want to switch that back to the way you had it listed.
You also have writeups for some of the serials being posted already done elsewhere — Saving the Cult, Purchase Negotation, The Bellamy, and Story for B at least, which you may want to include.
Who do you expect to be looking at your list-of-works? For me, I’d go alphabetically, and mark each one with status (whether it’s currently being posted, expected length, genre, ‘verse, whether it’s fanfic, whether it’s a writing or non-writing task). If you’re expecting folks who are looking for specific things, you might want to list by ‘verse (fanfic or original), genre, publication status, or task type? (For me as someone who mostly ignores emoji (despite using emoticons in my own text), pulling out the non-writing tasks under their own header rather than mixing them in might make picking one from type A and one from type B more straightforward.)
<eyes list> I don’t remember Beers and Summer being there before. Did you update the list? How about that one next?
I updated the list!
Beers and Summer is titled after a Darius Rutger song I heard on the way home, where I started “writing” this one by swearing at my speech to text – the title on the doc now is “Bonfires and summertime, Beers and Sunshine”
‘Cause everybody’s down in a world gone crazy
Don’t know how to fix it but I think maybe
Turn on the good times, turn off the TV
Yeah, the only BS I need is beers and sunshine
Summer helps people. Sometimes she hexes people in a helpful manner, but she generally likes to pass around good luck.
So what happens when someone on her campus comes to her asking for help, someone she wouldn’t normally think was worthy of help?
Short story, in theory.
Summer’s stories don’t usually collect as much peril (or even angst) as Autumn’s do. It might be short!
What’s Just Stake Angel? By title it sounds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic, and I think you’ve written in that ‘verse before.
That’s true! Summer has a bit of a sunnier life… 😉
(But Winter’s isn’t dour, not with all those pets now…)
Just Stake Angel! (Working Title)
I am doing a re-watch of Buffy and there is a moment early in season 1 where Buffy believes that Angel attacked her mother (He’s set up) and is trying to do as she does and slay him.
I started with “what happens if she succeeds” and then by the time I got to the part where Whistler (Agent of the very annoying Powers That Be) was interfering, I’d gotten a bit squicked by a 200-year-old guy being all sadface over a 16 year old and…
Buffy succeeds in getting an arrow through Angel’s heart. Whistler intervenes. Angel gets a life lesson in another dimension (possibly working as an FBI agent) and comes back a changed man in more ways than one.
Winter? Pets? What? Marina has *kids*. Kids aren’t pets. Pointer, please?
That sounds like a pretty thorough rewrite. (So much f’ing creepy in that show. Writing most of that out would be a really dramatic change.)
What’s F.I.B. M.A.D.?
Paint the Prison:
The war is over, and Azkaban is an unpleasant place to be or to work: drafty, full of vermin (not just the Death Eaters…), cold, damp, and dirty. The Dementors are gone, but the ancient buildings still reek of despair.
Then Jordan Lacewing (“Of the American Tuttle Branch of the Prewitts*”) marches in with her walking trunk (Trunky, of course) and declares that she is going to paint the prison.
Not just paint. Jordan Lacewing is a potions heiress, and she is going to coat every inch of the prison with layers of potions, as well as redecorating, repairing holes made in the war, and…
…bringing career and life training to the prisoners?
Seen through the eyes of a guard – Olivia – a prisoner – Blaise Zabini – and occasional others, this is about bringing prison reform to Wizarding Britain, whether it wants it or not.
* Prewitt = Molly Weasely’s natal family.
** Of those listed, Blaise is a canonical character. Other canonical characters show up in the background, but this is mostly about the prison and the reform.
That sounds very political…
It’s…. mostly a renovation fic? It’s not written as a real-world analogue at all, just an excuse to fix up a place that really needs it.
Oh, and test out some weird potions.
Spoonflower
*gently and quietly points to the directions*
@kelkyag
https://www.patreon.com/posts/torte-law-and-30926650 – Winter and pets.
They also show up in http://www.lynthornealder.com/2020/05/21/family-distancing/
F.I.B. M.A.D. The Federated Investigatory Bureau Mobile? Analysis Department
… too sleepy. more tomorrow.
Heh. Cats and ferrets at least both use mammalian predator body language, and can get along quite well with each other. Parrots use an almost entirely different language, and different care concerns, and are less likely to get along with either of the other two. Three little predators is edging towards crazy cat lady territory, though.
Sweet dreams!
They were pretty nice, but I don’t remember any of them, just that they weren’t unpleasant, thank you!
Winter is going to be a crazy cat Dude indeed. Police are going to start investigating him when someone dies nearby – he’s too tidy, too orderly, and he keeps cats AND ferrets!
Also he’s single, in the right age bracket, white
F.I.B. M.A.D.
Star Trek (TOS) meets Criminal Minds with a healthy dose of CSI (the original) thrown in: the Federation Investigatory Bureau’s Mobile Analysis Division travels the Federated Space exploring the unusual and unsolvable crimes.
Planned to be episodic in nature, the first episode follows cipher specialist Rosaliza Lanzyki (Ros) as she joins the team.
If this is not set in my Foedus Planatarum setting, it is set in a very close facsimile.
<headtilt> Is that crossover fanfic, or original work borrowing some flavor from the named shows?
Are you up for telling us about your active commissions (or at least the ones that will eventually be public stories), or should something with a title be next?
Original work, borrowing some flavor from the shows named. All original characters (and ships)
Hrrm, let’s go with something with with a name, s’il vous plait.
Mine Book! And is it related to Nano Mine?
They are sort of related, yes!
That is, they’re both minecraft-related. *cough*
Let’s see.
In our shared minecraft server, there is a very long railway. Several railways. And in-character in-game, the Lynk (Lyn-Kit Link) system has its own guidebook. It will tell you the nearby attractions to each stop, a little bit about the history of the lines, and which line to take to get to the interesting landmarks.
Heh. Clearly Nano Mine is next in queue, then. Are they set on the same server?
Nothing wrong with taking inspiration where you find it. A game that encourages world-building seems like a pretty solid choice.
Nano Mine:
This is more similar to the story I wrote to Mara’s prompt in this call.
There is a world full of magic, but the magic belongs to people who have long since vanished.
Sitting on the banks of the river, one fisher pulls up ancient artifacts. Normally, they sell these to the people from the island high above, but something about the markings on them makes her want, instead, to understand the language.
planned to be 23 -25 short stories, each about a minecraft book long, which may someday be available in a world download library.
(As this was planned for the July camp-nanowrimo and got about 1000 words in that time… may be a defunct project.)
You just wrote a story for it, or at least the start of one. It’s only defunct if you want it to be. It’s okay to stuff work-in-progress in a drawer for a while if you’re still interested in it but don’t have the inspiration/time/whatever for it currently. (If it’s partially posted, putting up an “in hiatus” note might be nice.)
That said, it’s also okay to declare a piece dead and firmly decline further requests. Or take it down. Reasonable things!
How about Castiel SoulMark? Fanfic?
I’m not sure on this one, because I really like the //idea//. So maybe I will chew on it a bit. 😀
Castiel SoulMark – prompted by Anke!
Dean had heard stories of people whose soulmate marks were the first words their soulmate spoke to them.
He’d never been able to decide, once he and Cas worked it out, whether or not he’d have preferred it that way. “I am the hand that pulled you from perdition” written on his body…
… That might have been a little strange with the ladies (and the gentlemen) he chose to spend time with before Cas.
As it was… as it was, it took him and Cas a while to figure it out.
Intended to be a short story.
Supernatural FanFiction.
… apparently what I know about Supernatural is that it’s a television show, and that there’s an angel character named Castiel (very round-aboutly, that bit), and nothing else. Fated mates/partners/something?
How about Owed A Life?
oh! So Supernatural does not have soulmates in it, I stole the idea from fandom-in-general, where often soulmates exist and have some sort of marking on their bodies. This was also inspired by a fic I CANNOT find now, much to my endless frustration, in which Erik Killmonger (Black Panther) and Hari Potter (female Harry) had marks on their bodies in languages/symbolism that was important to the other.
So Castiel is an angel and he pulls Dean out of hell at one point (at least one point). Dean is a human dude and a hunter who hunts demons and uses church latin to exorcise, etc.
Also he likes classic rock-n-roll.
Owed a Life
He had killed the Monster, he had done his deed. He’d expected to die. There were too many of the Monster’s soldiers between him and freedom.
An unknown archer, not one of the army he belonged to, not one of his Cause, saved his life three times (at least) on his escape.
Now he must find that archer to repay the debt.
And then, of course, he must convince the archer to accept the debt.
Or save their lives, that would work, too.
It’s going to be a long quest.
Planned to be a novella or novel, has a rough outline drawn up.
Yay outlines! Is this one faeapoc, or some other ‘verse? (Maybe don’t harass the nice archer, though …?)
“mm werewoif” (werewolf? or is werewoif a deliberate distinction?) sounds more like a description than a title already. What else wants saying about it? What ‘verse is it in?
it is… probably not fae apoc, the more I keep writing. Vaguely nicely fantasyish? He has some magic. It’s earthy.
werewolf with a typo that doesn’t show up on my excel sheet on the second monitor >.>
Yep, it’s a request from someone on Masto who did a lot of work pulling a fund together to help out people early in the lockdown.
Short story romance with some erotic elements – Evan is new to being a werewolf. He was planning on meeting up with a whole pack of weres to learn how to be one. Instead, only one other were shows up – and it’s storming.
Evan is a new werewolf
Shifter romance, check. 🙂 (This is apparently a substantial niche market?) And yeah, while a classic werewolf isn’t right out based on what’s shown up so far in fae apoc, it’s at least not how most animal changes seem to work.
So, Cyyaaa! I assume that one is Boom!/fae apoc, but there are many possible points in time and/or AUs. Anything you can say without spoilers?
Cyyaaa?
Do you want to do a writeup for TootFic and its various threads? (Planets, potions, …) How about art-not-writing things like Spoonflower? I think you already have something overview-like for each of the serials currently being posted.
Would you believe I realized in the shower this morning that I’d dropped this thread?
Cya – working title actually “Blueprints” but with “maps” on there it kept making people think that blueprints was, well, drawing blueprints.
They made it out of Addergoole more or less intact. They were building lives for themselves. They were raising children. And then the apocalypse began.
Cya, for all her plans, spends a lot of her storylines reacting rather than acting. This is the story – told in a similar fashion to Nathaen, a series of connected tales over 50+ years from pre- or peri-apocalypse through to when Cya reaches what I think of as her adulthood – of Cya learning to have, and then building, her own life on her own terms.
~*~
I have been considering putting in an excerpt for those that have good excerpts? Thoughts?
And yeah, tootfic by-thread would probably be a good idea, and ditto for art-not-writing things.
Generally, I’d be pro-excerpt, but perhaps look at the size of the page, and maybe get opinions from others? Long pages, and long lists especially, make some people’s eyes glaze over. (A clickable TOC helps for some people.) I am ~exactly the wrong person to ask if something is too long. :}
Many of Cya’s plans are/were/have been (halp, tense!) contingency plans. Even the ranch was … sort of a safehouse? Building Cloverleaf’s the first thing that’s proactive and making her own path, rather defending and rescuing and repairing. (Though even that could be looked at as a much larger scale safehouse, I suppose. Dunno where your “adulthood” line is.)
I think that’s all the named stories? I am wicked curious about Spoonflower. That’s a custom fabric printing place, no? You’re designing textiles?
Potions and the Apocalypse
Magic has always existed in the world – sometimes regulated, sometimes forbidden, often very quiet stuff. It was taught in continuing ed classrooms and whispered between practitioners. It smoothed the edges of life, made things a little easier.
Then the – well, was it an attack? Was it the weirdest natural disaster ever? Nobody is quite sure. But the stuff like ash fell all over the world, and in its wake –
It changed people, it changed animals, it changed the land. It brought magic to the forefront where it hadn’t been and made messes where there’d been- more or less – stability.
Technology and science started hurrying for solutions, but while they did, magic practitioners began working.
Written almost entirely in tootfiction, fiction under 1200 characters long (or about the length of this blurb)
Unexplained apocalypse is more than a little creepy!
Tootplanets? Are there other active or inactive toot threads?
Found the fic! It is on ff.net; maybe they moved off of ao3
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13035271/1/like-the-rain-chooses-the-grass
That was a very odd piece to read. Both characters are now completely out of context …?
Yeah, it’s rather odd (I wasn’t sure what this comment was for and I got nervous). I think it’s interesting enough to read, but I’m not sure either character is completely in character.
Ah, sorry, I didn’t mean that comment to be upsetting! I’m really not sure what the author’s goals were in that piece — it feels like someone flipped some coins to pick characters to try to write into a relationship. A character study of Erik under really weird stress, maybe?
IIRC, the author had written a number of soulmarks, so maybe they wanted to get further into Erik.
I’m always a bit weirded out by female-harry-potters, tbh, and only got that far because I liked the way they were writing Erik.