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Mailing list stories (and prompts!)
So I'm about two and a half months into my weekly short stories via email project, and it's going GREAT. I've been having fun going back through my extensive backlog of mostly-unsold stories from the last two decades and cleaning them up (and also realizing how vastly I've improved at big-picture writing skills; on a sentence-structure level I'm not that much better, but theme and structure and endings, holy moly - let's just say I am definitely realizing why I used to have so much trouble selling anything).
The shorter ones are pasted into the emails, but I've been putting the longer ones, between about 3-10K words, on BookFunnel. If you'd like to download any of them, you can get them here:
Hetsie's Wonders (Weird West with time travel)
Patch Work (a woman's life story from the '60s to now, depicted through the growth of a quilt)
Seize the Day (het romance fluff with a rooftop garden)
Kokopelli's Flute (an old woman gets a mysterious visitor)
The Mangroves Hold Their Secrets Deep (two college students search for a lost city in the Florida swamps)
Here, you can also have some of the upcoming stories early, from the emails scheduled for late May to mid-June:
The Bride in Furs (F/F fairy-tale type story reprinted in a "best of" anthology back in 2014)
Venus Dragonfly (F/F colonists-on-Venus sky pirates story that I have vague plans of rewriting to novella length eventually)
These are just the longer ones; the shorter flashfic-type stories are simply going out in emails. Next week's story is a short one like that, about a dragon who hires a private investigator. If you want to join the list for weekly stories, you can do it here: https://www.subscribepage.com/laylaslist
By sheer numbers, I'm fine on short stories until at least early next year. However, I would really love to have some new stories to intersperse with the older ones, many of which are depressing or experimental or frankly just not that good.
Would anyone like to give me some original fiction prompts that might be worked up into short stories or snippets? I'm not promising to write your prompt (in fact it's likely that many of them won't be written) but if I do, I'll put it in the comments here, as well as sending it out on the list. :) Any genre or style is fine. Fantasy, urban fantasy, or fantasy-historical are especially relevant to the kind of things I'm writing under this pen name, but as you can see from the above, I'm sending out all kinds of stories here.
The shorter ones are pasted into the emails, but I've been putting the longer ones, between about 3-10K words, on BookFunnel. If you'd like to download any of them, you can get them here:
Hetsie's Wonders (Weird West with time travel)
Patch Work (a woman's life story from the '60s to now, depicted through the growth of a quilt)
Seize the Day (het romance fluff with a rooftop garden)
Kokopelli's Flute (an old woman gets a mysterious visitor)
The Mangroves Hold Their Secrets Deep (two college students search for a lost city in the Florida swamps)
Here, you can also have some of the upcoming stories early, from the emails scheduled for late May to mid-June:
The Bride in Furs (F/F fairy-tale type story reprinted in a "best of" anthology back in 2014)
Venus Dragonfly (F/F colonists-on-Venus sky pirates story that I have vague plans of rewriting to novella length eventually)
These are just the longer ones; the shorter flashfic-type stories are simply going out in emails. Next week's story is a short one like that, about a dragon who hires a private investigator. If you want to join the list for weekly stories, you can do it here: https://www.subscribepage.com/laylaslist
By sheer numbers, I'm fine on short stories until at least early next year. However, I would really love to have some new stories to intersperse with the older ones, many of which are depressing or experimental or frankly just not that good.
Would anyone like to give me some original fiction prompts that might be worked up into short stories or snippets? I'm not promising to write your prompt (in fact it's likely that many of them won't be written) but if I do, I'll put it in the comments here, as well as sending it out on the list. :) Any genre or style is fine. Fantasy, urban fantasy, or fantasy-historical are especially relevant to the kind of things I'm writing under this pen name, but as you can see from the above, I'm sending out all kinds of stories here.
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Here are some ideas:
A girl gets lost in the forest or maybe just goes on a hike and doesn't get lost but finds some kind of magical creature or being believed to be mythological.
A girl comes to believe her house is sentient and it's trying to help her figure something out about herself or get through some kind of crisis
What if every time a person is kind, they turn into something else a little bit more? Kinda like how when Pinnochio lies, his nose grows so that everyone can see physical evidence of his deceit. But with this scenario, doing good things makes the protagonist look uglier or turn into a dragon little by little or whatever, so that they have to decide when to do or be good.
These are probably very terrible prompts! LOL
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Because dragons are always fun, how about a dragon who keeps a lair in the tunnels under New York, and the unwary urban explorers who stumble over it :D
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