Crowdfunding Open Prompt Call

[magistrate]

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Shared Worlds prompt call!

This prompt call is:

Closed

Prompting closed at: 11:59 PM PST, Monday, June 23, 2014

Thank you everyone for coming by! I will continue to write prompt responses until every prompter has received at least one response, and will hopefully complete a response for every prompt. However, prompting is now closed.

Sponsoring is:

Closed

Sponsoring remained open until: 11:59 PM PST, Friday, July 4, 2014

Thank you to everyone who contributed!

Wait. What is this? Briefly, please.

Leave me prompts, and I'll write you snippets of fiction. Donate $10, and get 500-word flash fiction or complete scenes on a prompt response of your choice. These funded scenes will become part of the Shared Worlds canon.

Who are you, anyway? Why should we care what you're writing?

I'm an author and editor of short fiction, with a number of professional publications, including appearances in various "Year's Best" compilations. You can read almost all of my short fiction for free online, and decide whether or not what I'm doing works for you.

So tell me about prompting. How does that work?

You leave me a prompt. I'll try to write a snippet of fiction for you. These will just be me jotting down bits of the story as they occur to me, which is how I approach writing generally; what you get will probably be a bunch of illustrative lines without any real connecting bits. A taste of what I'd be doing with the story. (Check the link for an example of how that formatting looks.)

I will try to get to every prompt – or at least one prompt from every prompter – but cannot guarantee that I will.

Prompts can be whatever you feel like. "A girl-in-tower-guarded-by-dragon story from the dragon's perspective" could be an example, as could "something riffing off Sappho's You May Forget", or even just "a F/F/M poly triad fights crime". There's a Bingo card below with some prompts – this time, I generated the card using the "worldbuilding" and "end of the world" lists that ysabetwordsmith worked up – but those are just jumping-off points, and should not be considered restrictive. Feel free to suggest anything.

(I reserve the right to refuse any prompts, though only expect to exercise this right if I've got too many prompts on my plate, or if I find prompts offensive. Additionally, you can't prompt for stuff in universes I've already written, unless they were written in this prompt call or are otherwise part of the Shared Worlds canon.)

Okay, and what do I get if I pay you? And why $10?

If you donate $10 (USD) toward a prompt response I've already written (whether or not you were the one to prompt for it), you will get a minimum of 500 words (of new writing) of non-patchy fiction expanding on the response or continuing to flesh out its potential story. Could be a 5x drabble or flashfic, could be a complete scene in a potential short story. You may get more than 500 words – you may get substantially more, depending on how the mood strikes me and how engaged I am with the universe of the prompt response. But 500 words is the guaranteed minimum.

$10 for 500 words works out to 2¢/word. This is lower than I usually aim my fiction, but I'm hoping that it'll be an accessible price point for people, which in turn would help build up a canon of works in the Shared World universes.

For this prompt call, I'll release these flashfics/scenes into the Shared Worlds canon, which allows authors to write and sell derivative, transformative works (including fanfiction) based on the stories, so long as they release them under a similarly permissive license. My eventual hope is to create a body of works which can offer people the community benefits of a fandom while still nurturing and encouraging a culture of rewarding creative folk for their work.

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Gamma Ray Burst	Dominant species	Magic
Local cuisine	Overpopulation	Extreme weather
Honors & insults	Sex / gender dynamics	Divine intervention

Comments

Wind Crossing the Brown Land

[magistrate]

Woo! Clocking in at around 2300 words, this... may or may not be the first scene of a novel. But it's also the first work to be officially released into the Shared Worlds canon!

Thanks for the prompt, and thank you so much for donating!

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Jem brought her battered old Solarnik to rest on the side of a road. At least, it had been a road once; now the prairie grasses were tearing into it, their insistent roots crumbling the ancient asphalt into grit.

Part of her admired them. They were dead-grass brown and more sunbeat than she was, but they covered the land here. Their roots kept the dirt held down. Look any way toward the horizon, and except for the fading scar of the old highway, there was nothing but that waving tan.

She pushed the door open, though the breeze was hot. Swung her feet out from the car and put them on the ground, leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees. Her phone searched for a signal and the sun fell on her shoulders, her bare arms, the back of her neck; she could feel her hair soaking up the heat like it was planning to poach her brain in its own juices. She'd taken the hint when she was still south in the desert, had painted the roof of her car a slick white. But her hair was black, and hats made the skin above her ears itch, and the knots of bandanas annoyed her, so she'd said fuck it. Her hair could bake. She'd dealt with worse.

After a while, her phone deigned to connect to some lonely satellite up above, and buzzed with a message. Jem keyed it up, and let out a breath: good. Only about ten minutes old; not something she'd missed hours ago as she drove through the trackless wilds.

[You there yet?] the message read.

[Just got here,] Jem typed back, and stared at the screen. Its cover kept most of the glint off, but there was still enough reflection that it felt like the sun was reading over her shoulder, analyzing her life choices. After a while, a new message appeared.

[Can't be. I'm here. Which GPS are you using?]

Jem gave the sky a I really forget that? look, and typed back [India. You?]

She could imagine Amica judging her from however many minutes of latitude and longitude away she was. She'd be using the American system, of course. Jem didn't like the American satellites, though; they never seemed to get her where she needed to be, when it came to coordinates and not addresses. Why was a question she'd never hunted out the answer to – the people she knew squabbled about universal inaccuracies introduced to foil home-grown targeting systems, about satellites drifting out of alignment, about viral code in the computers, about backdoors in the phone GPS software that kept people from visiting locations that weren't on a whitelist... and Jem just cut the damn knot and paid someone to hack her phone to track to a system that actually worked.

[Never mind], Jem sent. [I'll translate the coordinates for you.] Last Jem knew, Amica had a car that didn't protest every time you asked it to do something. That actually cooled her while she drove. Amica could drive out here, not that the exact location mattered worth a damn.

She sent off the coordinates, got a [K] in response, then looked at the sky. It was a washed-out blue that deepened toward the east, with a few wispy clouds struggling on, high above. An empty sky over and empty part of the world.

If she was going to be waiting, she decided, she might as well get out of the stuffy heat of the car and into the clear heat of the prairie. Stretch her legs, even if the only place to go, really, was up and down the old road. Ten meters in any other direction and she'd have to have the GPS point her back to her car. At least she had the location set. A crappy little place in the middle of nowhere, picked out of lat-long blocks she had no business being in, selected by dice-rolls so that no one would think to track her out here.

So she did, crunching along the abandoned highway, hearing here and there the drone of bugs. Nothing changed, as she walked – not even an ancient aluminum can, rolled flat and forgotten – appeared underfoot.

Until a breath of cold air passed by her.

Jem froze in place, half-remembered ghost stories and half-believed superstitions gripping her by the hindbrain. Then she took a deep breath, flexed her fingers, and turned to survey the land around her.

She had a collapsible baton on her right beltloop, and it was suddenly heavy and present in her awareness. Didn't matter that she didn't know what kind of cold-air threat would be that she could beat up with a baton. Maybe one of Boss's bounty hunters had come up with a handheld air conditioner?

Yeah, right.

There was nothing to be seen, but the cold air came again, and Jem turned her head to catch its direction. It was coming from somewhere out in the tall grass, and she pushed a few of the stalks aside with her hand.

Then she checked her phone, muttered "Screw it," and felt her way forward into the prairie.

The tallgrass here might look dead, but it grew with plenty of vigor. Most of it swished up past her hips, some of it up to her armpits, and there were no shortage of stalks waving up above her head. She had no idea how many kinds of grass there were, though they scraped at her skin as she went through; hopefully none were razor grass. Hopefully none were poisonous. Hopefully there were no snakes coiling on the ground, or stinging insects clinging to the stalks.

But as she pushed through she saw a strange gap in the grasses, and she slowed down. Crouched low, then pushed the last few handsbreadths through to see a sinkhole, maybe fifteen meters wide at an estimate. When the wind came from across it, it blew cool.

Huh, Jem thought, and crouched down by it. She'd never seen one of these before.

She didn't hear the motor of Amica's car, but her phone buzzed, and a second later she could hear Amica's voice calling out "Hey! You hiding?"

"Over here," Jem yelled. A second later, she heard someone pushing their way through the grass.

"You're in trouble, aren't you?" Amica called. Jem quirked a smile; she could see a disturbance in the tall grass, but she couldn't see Amica yet. From her position at the edge of the drop, she guessed she wouldn't see Amica until she was a couple meters away. "You only ever want to meet me in the middle of arid nowhere–"

"Watch your step," Jem called back. Then, as an afterthought, "Come on, I am trouble."

"You are," Amica said, and pushed through to her. Jem turned her head, but didn't get up.

Amica was wearing her long white sleeves, and they fluttered in the breeze. She always said it was cooler that way. Jem didn't care. She liked the feeling of the sun on her skin, even when it was pounding the blood dry in her skull. She was dark enough from her mother's side that she'd never burned, and she didn't care much about the spectre of skin cancer later in life. She'd spent most of her teens thinking she'd die by twenty-one anyway.

Now at twenty-six, she met her continued survival with an ongoing, wary surprise.

"I fucking hate my life, Ami," she said. "What's the point of it? I could be a fetch and carry girl for the big man on Lake Mead. Die without doing anything worth anything to anyone. I can't even think why I get up in the morning." Aside from sheer stubbornness, and the fact that pining in bed and waiting to die sounded unendurably boring.

Amica looked at her, and her face said that this scared her more than Jem's usual grousings. "Uh," she said, and edged closer, then crouched down and trailed her fingertips along the dry dirt. "Okay. You should tell me if I should really be worried about this, 'cause we're having this conversation right on the edge of a giant hole in the earth."

Jem blinked. She hadn't considered the implication, there. Honestly, suicide just seemed like more of a pointless waste than living out the rest of her stupid pointless life down south. "I'm fine," she said. "I actually didn't even know this was out here."

Amica let out a huge whoosh of breath. "Okay," she said, and rocked back onto her butt. And from her tone, that was that. Jem being bitter was just Jem being Jem, while Jem being maudlin and sitting on a precipice was context out of bounds.

"I needed to get away," Jem said. It sounded like an apology to her ear, but Amica didn't take it as one.

"I've been saying that," she said. "You need to crash wit me for a while?"

"Have to go somewhere," Jem said. "Could be dangerous, though."

"Daughter of homesteaders," Amica said. "I've got shotguns."

Yeah, and what do you think we used back where I'm from? Jem was temped to ask. It sure wasn't stern words and wrist-slaps. And it tended to come with a higher rate of fire.

Instead of saying that, she stood and walked around the edge of the sinkhole to where the sun slanted over it and got in her eyes. Then something caught her eye down below, pale in the deep shadow like a jutting bone.

"Look at this," she said, and crouched down.

Amica picked herself up and came around, though she kept a good distance between herself and the edge. Jem didn't bother. She swung her feet over the edge and leaned forward, trying to make sense of the shapes down below.

"What is that?" Amica asked.

"It's like the side of the Coliseum," Jem said, and Amica looked at her. "I've seen goddamned pictures, okay," Jem said.

"No, you're right," Amica said, and shaded her eyes. "Those are, like, Ionic columns. Like someone stuck a city hall into the wall, and then it got... swallowed up."

Jem pushed back from the hole, and stood up. She scanned the landscape again, casting her gaze out toward the horizon. Even in America's heyday, she didn't think this place had been built up; from what she knew from old road atlases and trivia sites, this whole swath of country had been farmland before it had gone arid. That was another reason she liked the prairie grass; they'd said this place would be desert, couldn't be saved for irrigation or prayers, but the grass didn't care.

But there were no houses out here, decaying back into the landscape. The road that came out here had been some county highway that no one spared a thought for. Not the kind of place someone would build a place with marble columns – and if they had, sinkholes didn't swallow things up and leave them mostly-intact and sticking out of the walls.

"Wonder if you can get down there," Jem said. She had tie-down cables in her car, not that she'd trust her life to them. She didn't carry climbing gear. Why would she?

"Climbing down a sinkhole?" Amica asked. "I mean, correct me, but that sounds like a stupid idea."

Jem shrugged one shoulder. The cool air that blew off of the sinkhole was like a beacon, and the longer she looked at the pale column down below, the more she thought she could pick out the shape of a larger structure. Passages retreating back into the walls. Hell, it could have been a whole underground city.

"It's scary as hell going into mineshafts," Amica was saying, "and those things were made for people to go down. You know that gases can build up underground so bad that they'll kill you a few feet in from the entrance?"

Jem grunted.

"And I've heard that these things can just open up in the ground one day with no warning at all, sometimes right in the middle of town," Amica went on. "What if it does that again, but while you're down there?"

"Fuck," Jem said. "If I lived life thinking like that, I–"

She hadn't thought the sentence through, and found that she didn't really have a way to finish it. I wouldn't be on the run was an option, but while getting away from the Boss probably had a net positive effect on her life, it wasn't the kind of decision she could hold up as something to be envied.

Amica sighed. "The hell did you do, Jem," she said, but it sounded like she said it to herself. So, Jem decided not to answer. They both knew the salient parts – that she was up here running and hiding from something, that she'd brought it on herself – anyway.

"I want to see what's down there," Jem said. If nothing else, it was something that wasn't carrying brown packages and threatening messages up and down the Colorado. A little blip against the meaningless drudgery of her life.

"Use binoculars," Amica suggested. "Hey, come on. I'm melting out here. You called me because you needed a place to lay low for a while, didn't you?"

Another shift in the wind set the cool air around Jem again. She kept her eyes on the shape down below, and thought about buried cities, buried mineshafts, long-forgotten bunkers, accidental empires.

It was all flights of fancy. And she'd never afforded herself many of those, before. But still, the deep column called to her, and she said, "Be crazy if I've just found one."

Re: Wind Crossing the Brown Land

[ysabetwordsmith]

Fascinating. I like the airid future and the stubborn prairie plants.