Clare-Dragonfly

d_generate_girl is looking for a place to live in New York. As she writes, I have known her since she was 13 and can attest that she is an awesome person and unlikely to do murders. So if you know of an apartment available in Manhattan or Queens, let her know.

aldersprig is doing a Giraffe Call on the theme of Animalia! She writes awesome fiction so you should prompt her and get an awesome story.

aldersprig is taking prompts to go with a bingo card. And this one.

dancingthroughstars is doing Tarot readings to help pay for needed surgery. I had a great and really helpful reading!

cat_rood is taking commissions for knitted stuff.

wander_realtai is crowdfunding a painting, entitled "Nebula."

Disabled Poet Seeks Healthy Macbook

A very dear friend of mine needs money for medical expenses. You can read the full story at the YouCaring page, but the basics are that she has a rare and extremely painful illness. I've seen the progression of this disease on her body and it's awful. It can cause her pain just to be touched. There's an unusual medical procedure that can put her illness into remission, but her insurance won't cover it. She's had it done before and it was a complete and miraculous success for several years, until a different medical procedure was botched and caused the illness to come back. So far she's raised a decent amount of money, but not nearly enough for the procedure. Please, if you can't give, spread the word--every little bit helps!

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And on a different note, becka_sutton recently posted about Patreon. I am really intrigued by its setup and keep coming back to it. Basically, people sign up to donate a certain amount for each piece that's released--it seems to be mostly video creators and musicians, so people are paying per video or per song. (I did do a search and found some people doing written fiction, but they don't seem to be having success yet.)

I'm considering how I might make this work for me as a crowdfunding model. One of the main reasons I stopped doing Gardens of Prose was that I don't like taking a chunk of time out of my usual novel-writing schedule to write a bunch of short stories, much as I enjoy writing to prompts otherwise. (Actually, that might be the entire reason.) But I do enjoy writing a short story from time to time--or, like I did earlier this month, tossing out a bunch of them when I find myself unexpectedly between longer projects.

So I was thinking about setting up a Patreon project for my short fiction--like I said to Becka, it seems like the sort of thing that makes more sense with a somewhat irregular schedule, rather than a serial novel like Chatoyant College with predictable updates. I would post most stories to my journal like usual, and would accept requests from patrons and offer patron-only stories (as well as other benefits). Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Would you sign up to give me a dollar per short story?

I would also be interested to see other people trying this out!

sharpeningthebones is having a Kickstarter for an awesome anthology, and also a prompt call!

tomorrownevercomes is also having a prompt call to raise some needed funds.

Two of my always-Kickstart creators are having Kickstarters at the same time:
MeiLin Miranda, author of An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom, is Kickstarting The Machine God, her book in a shared world series called The Drifting Isle Chronicles. If you like steampunk or just awesome writing, check it out!

Unwoman is Kickstarting her next album of cello covers. I am drooling. I'm already obsessed with her music, but if you like cellos, check it out!

bigbang_mixup is starting up again! In this big bang, mixers create playlists first, and then authors create stories based on those (and artists create art based on the stories)! I did this last year, and while I wasn't a hundred percent happy with the story I ended up with, I had a lot of fun writing based on a playlist. Signups for mixers, authors, and artists open tomorrow!

aldersprig is doing amazing things. I don't even know what to link to. But if you like fantasy and/or SF and/or erotica, you should read her stories. Go read them!

The Three Jaguars is now a webcomic! It's starting a little slow, but I'm looking forward to seeing where it will go. If you're not already familiar with the Three Jaguars, M. C. A. Hogarth wrote a series of essays on business and marketing for artists of all kinds--because the jaguars are Marketer, Business Manager, and Artist, all contained within on person. It's great advice and webcomics are awesome.

Unwoman, quite probably my single favorite musician, is doing a Kickstarter for her new album. You can get a digital download of it for as little as $1. There's an audio teaser on the page--give it a listen!

cat_rood has written about bullying and cyberstalking. This is something that should be spread around.

aldersprig is doing her June Mini-Giraffe Call! Go and give her prompts about her awesome world of Reiassan--it's a fantasy world with magic and riding goats, and there have been stories set in a medieval and a steampunk era, plus a rich history.


If I owe you a comment on something, I apologize. I seem to be even more behind than usual due to an influx of posts--casestory, bigbang_mixup, kink_bingo ramp-up, and junetide are all posting at once! If you've posted fiction in the last few weeks and I haven't commented on it, it's probably open in a tab, and I will get to it. (So many tabs.) However, if there's anything in particular you want feedback on soon, feel free to give me a poke--I don't mind rearranging my reading priorities.

♥ to you all!

Some of these are quite old, I'm afraid! I believe they're all still applicable, though.

elialshadowpine wrote a post about Women in Urban Fantasy and the Mistreatment Thereof.

whatawaytoburn is taking prompts!

analect wrote about the screwed up British disability support system. There's a petition you can sign if you're a UK citizen.

Stories Are Genderless, so guess what? Boys can read stories about girls too! Wow!

Links to all the 2012 short story Hugo nominees. Some are online and some are PDFs.

aldersprig wrote No Parades, a cool science fiction short story. (Actually, I'm not sure whether it's science fiction or fantasy or what, but the use of redacted felt more SF to me.)

jessicasteiner is holding a cover art contest for The Sleeping Death. There are monetary prizes and promotion opportunities.

pathological_needlepoint wrote Beyond Price, an awesome stealth sonnet, and is now taking prompts.

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Holy crap, I have actually posted three times today, and my reading list is full of stuff today. I'd say there's something in the water, but I'm pretty sure that something is 3W4DW. Speaking of which, hi, new friends! ::waves:: I don't normally post this much, but the posts from the past couple of days are probably a good indication of what I usually post...

limiinal is taking prompts for flash fiction on the theme of masks, memory, and magic, and has written Scramble to my prompt!

Scheherezade's Facade: Fantastical Tales of Gender Bending, Cross-Dressing, and Transformation is a Kickstarter campaign for a fantasy anthology. All the stories are there, but they need funds for publication. One of the authors included, Aliette de Bodard, is among my favorite short story writers ever.

ariestess's free monthly one card draw is open!

The Torn World March Muse Fusion is open! If you leave a prompt there, I might end up writing to it!

Here is a fun story about unicorns.

I may have posted about this before, but Plunge Magazine is having a Kickstarter to, well, start up the magazine--it will be a place for genre stories about queer women. With only five days left, it's having trouble meeting its goal. The magazine will exist even if it doesn't make its goal, but I'd like it to not struggle in its first year!

stonetalker is having a leap day two-card Tarot draw, using two different decks.

Here's an interesting article about clicks in African click languages and the ways speakers of different languages process sounds. It goes into the use of tones in Mandarin Chinese, as well. Plus there's a video with a beautiful "Click Song."

The Rose and Bay Awards honor excellence in crowdfunded creativity. Unfortunately voting is only at Livejournal, but you should be able to sign in with OpenID to vote in the polls.

This year you can vote for me and my Garden of Prose project under the Fiction category! Thanks for the nomination, ysabetwordsmith!

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