Be a Tie-Breaker for my October Theme Poll

So, yesterday I opened the October Theme Poll, and the three September ≥$5 donors/patrons voted nearly immediately.

And I have a three-way tie between
1. Stranded World (Setting)
5. Impossible situations (motif)
and
9. Dragons Next Door (Setting)

Want to be my tie-breaker?

(It's now Stranded World 2 and Impossible situations 2)

Become a Patreon Patron at the $5 level or higher OR Commission something via Paypal at least $5.

As a Patreon patron, you'll have access to Patreon-only fiction. Donate $6 or more, and you'll also put us over the threshold for a second chapter on both serials this Sunday, and get the Patreon that much closer to the first donation threshold.

Commission a story, and I'll write you your very own fiction, 250 words for every $5.

All that, and you'll be able to break the tie, thus single-handedly deciding the fate of my October writing AND possibly the October Giraffe Call.

The Ship that Visited, a story for the Giraffe Call

To rix_scaedu's prompt.

When the space ship hovered over Earth, everyone feared the worst.

We'd all seen the movies, so many movies about alien invasion. War of the Worlds. Independence Day. Signs. The list went on. They were doing to alien-a-form our planet. They were going to enslave all of us and kill the ones that couldn't work. They were going to eat us.

When the ship just - stayed there, people started to wonder. The best linguists and the small-stipend-retrainer xeno-specialists started working on communication. Planes circled the ship, trying to find an entrance. The subject of bombing was debated endlessly. Meanwhile, the ship - stayed there, doing nothing.

The scientists went over it with every instrument they could come up with. There was some exhaust, mostly water vapor, but the ship wasn't sending out radio waves, x-rays, infared - anything. It was just sitting there.

We'd almost started to get used to it. We'd gone back to farming - those of us who farmed - to office crunching - those who worked in offices - to vacations and TV watching and whatever our lives had been like BS, Before Ship. We just didn't look up, if we lived in the northern hemisphere, or, if we did, we didn't look too far up.

And then, five months to the day after the ship had appeared, we all heard the noise. It was something like a squeak of a gate, but much louder, and something like the squeal of tires, but lower-pitched. And in the bottom of the ship, ten circles opened up and beams of - oh, I don't know. Not sure anyone knows, to this day. But we called it steam and it felt like fog, like very thick fog.

Beams of this stuff began sweeping the hemisphere, one three-foot-wide swath at a time. And when they passed by, things had... changed.

My goats were walking on two feet (but only some of them) and I'd found myself with hooves. Cattle farmer down the road had the same problem, and the horse farmer across the street doesn't really talk right anymore.

Anywhere there were animals, some of them turned out to be a bit anthropomorphised. And anywhere there was humans - everywhere - some of them turned out a bit more animal.

The way I figure it, the aliens had been spending all this time trying to figure out what we wanted - and they'd been doing it by watching anime.

---

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Chapter Twelve: If You Call It a Fish, People Will Expect It to Swim

“Tairiekie, what are you doing?” Enrie leaned in to the stall, and then quickly leaned back again.

“Why are you doing it in the stables?” Saydrie didn’t even poke his head in the stall.

“You’re either going to get us in trouble or make us late for dinner.” Enrie tch’d in disappointment, or perhaps hunger. “And you might upset the goats.”

Continue reading on the website!

Classrooms of Doomsday, a continuation of Addergoole

This comes after Whilst at Doomsday.

Nehara was fascinating - her story was fascinating. Luke cleared his throat. "I'd love to hear more about The Res, miss - but I'm here right now for a tour of Doomsday." Business, that's what he needed to focus on. All business.

And her smile suggested that, wise beyond her age, she knew exactly what he was doing. "Of course. Why don't we start with Professor Agislaw's class? It's right here, and he knows we're coming." She gestured across the street from the Dining-Hall-church.

The building didn't look that much more like a school than the Dining Hall did - indeed, the three story brick building looked like an old Victorian house or, perhaps, one of the apartment buildings Luka had walked past on his way here. Only the stained glass windows on the first floor - showing bright scenes of education - gave it away.

They followed three pre-teenaged-children - all three in the black-grey-and-white school uniform - through the wide front foyer, past a comfortable-looking sitting room where a few older students were sitting and into the first obviously-school-looking room Luke had yet seen.

Nestled between what he was pretty sure was a kitchen and that living room, the classroom was exactly that - smaller than the norm, perhaps, housing only ten student desks, but it had chalkboards at the front and maps on the side wall.

And, standing behind the teacher's desk, dressed in more expensive tailoring than was available in the world anymore, was Kheper, former student of Addergoole.

Luke cleared his throat. Well, she'd said she was staffing the school. He shouldn't have been surprised. And yet, somehow, he was.

Next: Discoveries at Doomsday - http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/838972.html

The Lands of the Circled Plain, a... setting story? for #3ww

To Three-Word-Wednesday (Today's words are Barren, Intense, Worry).

Set in the world of the Circled Plain, the same 'verse as my webserial Jumping Rings.

The land of the Circled Plain was barren. Everyone knew that. It had been blasted, bombed, and then stripped of everything that remained by explosions of magic that came both during and after the Great War. It was dead. Everyone knew it.

The common knowledge had its flaws, of course. First of all, there were farmers who lived outside the city walls, planting seeds and growing food in the blasted land of the Circled Plain. True, they had things to worry about that a pre-War farmer might not: seeds might die, or grow backwards in time, or, sometimes, they might sprout something not entirely vegetal and often quite hungry. But they grew food in the barren lands of the Circled Plain.

Secondly, the walled cities that gave the plain its name - New Indapala, Red Sinachi, and so on - were, if you wanted to be nit-picky, actually on the plain's land, especially as they grew outwards, ringed wall by ringed wall. And inside those walls, animals grazed and plants grew, planted seed by tedious seed in the barren lands.

Those were logical issues, however. The problem really lay in the third flaw: the places where people neither lived nor farmed.

There were miles and miles of land between cities, long stretches that took days to travel. And in those places, plant life and animal did not struggle, it didn't wither and die. Rather, it grew. It grew wild, intense, and poisonous. It grew thick enough to destroy buildings and drink up watering holes. It grew over rivers and into lakes - and it grew hungry and, sometimes carnivorous.

It wasn't that the land of the Circled Plain was barren. It was that it was so much more alive than the humans who moved through it.

Doomsday Academy: First Day of Camping Club

This is set in Cynara's Doomsday Academy, several years after its founding.

"This is camping club." Cynara settled herself on top of one of her now-infamous chests. "You may wonder, 'why camping?' After all, it's a hobby for what we once called first-world hobbyists."

She looked around the club. The older students were smiling. They knew this routine by now. The new kids looked impatient, like she was making Dad Jokes.

Well, then. She smiled, the one Howard called the Mink Smile. "The thing is, 'camping' is really 'surviving outside of civilization.' And if you've heard anything at all about me, well, then you know survival is what I'm about."

She had caught their attention, but, then again, they'd come here for a reason. "Welcome to camping club. Your first assignment is to gather everything you need to survive a day and a night in the wilderness - in under ten pounds of carry weight."

The Creation of the Faerie Apocalypse Setting

I've always been a fan of the post-apoc genre. There's something cool about rebuilding a world - being forced to rebuild a world - while having some knowledge and relics of the world before.

(There's something even cooler about the concept of the post-apoc cargo cult, worshiping relics of a world you know longer know or remember. But that's a story for another day.)

Add to that fascination a Cold-War childhood with the nebulous sense that the end is nigh, and a fondness for those comic takedowns that point out that damage done by super-human fights (Kingdom Come comes to mind), and you have the beginnings of the Faerie Apocalypse setting.

What happens when the monsters fighting to take over the world and the heroes fighting to save it are the same sort of being? What happens when their fights destroy as much property as the "bad guys" originally did on their own? What happens, in short, when hundreds of super-powered people suddenly start fighting over territory occupied by millions of humans?

What happens is an apocalypse, a faerie apocalypse. And it is in the middle of that mess that "Monster Godmother," my short story, takes place.

---

"Monster Godmother" can be found in What Follows, here:
Amazon
Smashwords
Barnes & Noble
(We will be on Kobo shortly)
Goodreads

Cave & Dungeon #Promptcall: dominant women, submissive men

This prompt call is all about Lyn comfort writing. *cough*

I want to write a bunch of fun, self-indulgent pieces, and I'm raising money to make my "cave," the room where I write, prettier and more comfortable to write in. So: caves and dungeons.

I noticed, looking at pretty pictures on Deviantart the other day, that there were lots of pictures of collared women, submissive women - and very few of collared, submissive men. So this prompt call is all about captured men, enslaved men, kidnapped men, submissive men, trapped men.

(Note: I will default to non-sexual-explicit content unless you ask for explicit stuff, to avoid discomfort all around. There will, otoh, be lots of slavery and tying up and kink, probably).

Leave a prompt, and I will write a micro/flash-fic. Leave as many prompts as you want; I will try answer at least one for each person (although I may use more than one prompt in a fic) and I WILL write at least to the first 10 people to prompt.

Want more words, or just really like something you read? Drop some money in the tip jar!

(The cuffs are the tip jar)

For every $1 you donate, I will write 75-100 words on the Giraffe story of your choice. Donate more than $1, and I'll write a second fic to your prompts.

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!

at $40, I will commission a piece of character art from a crowdfunded artist Reached!

At $50, I will write an extra fic for everyone. One prompter chosen at random will get an extra 500-word story. Reached!

At $75, three prompters chosen at random will get an extra 500-word story written to their prompt Reached!

At $100, three more prompters chosen at random will get an extra 500-word story.

At $120, I get a rug for my cave!

Have fun! Prompt!