Patreon!

After much deliberation, I have finally created a Patreon. It's set up so that patrons will give me prompts, which I will then use to create patron-only stories (or at one of the higher levels, patron-only and free stories). I'm hopeful that this will be a better way for me to write stories to prompts and get paid for them than the Garden of Prose was. (I really liked doing it, but because I was hurrying to get the first bit written and posted for each prompt, most of the stories ended up unfinished.)

So obviously I will be grateful if anyone decides to become a patron, but I will also be delighted if you just spread the word. And I will keep posting free stories here to prompts or whatever else catches my fancy! With Patreon, there will just, I hope, be more stories.

Fiction: The Bowl

Title: The Bowl
Word count: 238
Rating: G
Prompt: Steering the Craft: Chastity
Notes: I'm working (slowly) through one of Ursula K. Le Guin's writing books, Steering the Craft. Every chapter has a topic and an exercise. I like most of them, but this one is my favorite by far. The idea is to write a short passage without using any adjectives or adverbs at all. There are a lot of cross-outs on my page, and I'm not sure I got them all. It was a fun and challenging exercise, and I think I'll do it again. I was also intrigued by the story that emerged, so I figured I'd share it!


She placed the bowl on the table, moving with as little speed as she could. Her hands shook. A droplet of water spilled over the lip of the bowl, onto the table. It shook and shivered, throwing the candlelight about, then sank into the wood until it was out of sight. She held her breath and looked into the bowl, wondering whether she had to begin again, but it had been only the one drop; she could see no difference in the height of the water. It still lapped so close to the edge of the bowl that, if she laid her hand down so it was just touching the bowl, it would be touching water as well.( Read more... )