This week: What's Next? Edited by: Legerdemain  
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What's Next?
The WDC party is over, and while a few activities will run a bit longer, most parties have ended for the birthday celebration. Did you go each day to see all the new emoticons and pick up the daily trinket? I was on a beach vacation for a few days but managed to stop in. Now the question is, "What's next?"
Reviewing, of course. All the new items popping up during the celebrations will need reviews. Take a little time and see what there is to Read & Review. I find the most interesting things when I click that button in the left column.
Then, it's time to squeeze the pink gooshy thing between your ears and prep for October. October? What's in October? Horror and Scary month! The gift point Ghosties will appear in the scrolling messages and a lot of prompts will be centered around horror and scary. So before the pressure is on, think about some cool characters you'd like to include in your stories or a story-line you'd love to get written. Some free-writing or more structured outlines can help you be prepared.
Speaking of prepared, you know what is just around the corner. NaNoWriMo . If you have never participated, check it out and sign up. WDC has a lot of prep and NaNo activities you can sign up for. WDC even has a word counter to help you track your progress. Give it some thought now and be prepared.
Some contests require you to enter something new, or write to a prompt, but I think it's okay to have a character or two waiting on the sidelines ready to be sent into play.
Have fun with it and as always Write On!
This month's question: Are you preparing for a busy upcoming holiday season? Send in your answer below!  Editors love feedback!
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Official Site Contest for September
Quote Prompt for September 2024:
"It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."
— Bill Gates
Excerpt: “A penny my foot. Hell, I’d give a whole dollar for those thoughts,” Robby teased, anxiously standing by with a plateful of lunch in one hand and a tall lager in the other. “Mind if I join you, Mike? The place is packed.”
Excerpt: Sydney's ears have been ringing off and on for the last few weeks. She didn't think about it much at first, but as time went on it was getting louder and more frequent. She should probably do something about it.
Like any witch worth her salt, she went to look for a cure in a spell book.
| |  | The Dome (E)
The last few thousand humans on a planet live in a protective space under dire threat.
#2326518 by brom21  |
Excerpt: The squeak of grinding gears, tall cylindrical humming and blinking lights filled the laboratory. Dr Fisk worked at a computer with tensed nerves and a sweaty brow as he breathed exasperatingly.
A new prompt every 24 hours!
Excerpt: "I warned you!" she screamed. "I warned you not to go traipsing around in the fields when you have work to do!"
| | | Flight (E)
Darragh isn't sure, but what happens is quite the adventure for the young hunter
#2326342 by hihohyena  |
Excerpt: "No! What in the gods' names are you plannin'?!" Darragh's grip tightened on Ronan's shirt, the thin cloth keeping his nails from digging into the skin of his palms. He stared out onto the water that crashed against the cliffside, the smell of salt water overwhelmed the hunter's nostrils and heightened his unease.
Excerpt: “This is kinda nice, innit,” Paige grinned, tapping her manicured fingernails on the oak veneer of the musty old office. She flung herself into a chair, immediately toppling it onto its back legs, and put her feet onto the table. “Sit with me,” she waved to her bff, who dutifully strolled over and dumped herself unceremoniously into the chair next to Paige.
Excerpt: Yesterday, I stood looking out the patio door into the back yard, trying to muster up that "glass is half full" sort of attitude. A shudder went through me as I thought about what was ahead.
Excerpt: “Joanie Winters, I sentence you to mandatory attendance at the First-Step Addiction Recovery Center for Women for possession of heroin with the intent to sell. This sentence is to be carried out immediately.”
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This month's question: Are you preparing for a busy upcoming holiday season? Send in your answer below! Editors love feedback!
Last month's "Short Stories Newsletter (August 14, 2024)" question: Have you changed your style of writing to be more inclusive?
oldgreywolf scribbles : As a dominant male, I always found it easier to work with women. Intelligent, self-respectful women, not possessing the semi-spherical testosterone-producing glands many males think with, were more willing to work as part of a team, rather than cause dissent.
My characters? I favor mammalian/mammalian-like. The long-term ones are almost exclusively women (you've never heard of where they're from), but some males who fit in are also present. This is also multi-cultural.
Some are tri-gender, depending upon their age/life cycle. This is VERY multi-cultural.
Some of the other characters are stupid in various ways, of which our planet has a finite but uncountable host of examples, gender immaterial. Someone has to be cannon fodder. Let it be the stupid ones.
W.D.Wilcox  : Have you changed your style of writing to be more inclusive?
"There is and always will be just two genders as God has planned it."
Elisa: Middle Aged Stik  : At this point, I haven't made major changes to my writing to be more inclusive. My females leads have historically strayed from feminine stereotypes, while my male leads have been more emotionally complex even outwardly. The supporting characters can sometimes hew closer to gender stereotypes, but even then the gender rules get bent out of shape fairly often.
That said, for my short story cycle project, my three leads all have unisex names. I decided that it would be fun to play around with this aspect of my leads since the cycle focuses a lot on polyamory. There are other challenges in the cycle, and they cause my male leads to be in more caretaker-like roles while the female lead embarks on major creative adventures. So while I'm not overtly making my characters genderfluid, they could end up being genderfluid by way of their actions. We'll see. The cycle is just getting started.
Prosperous Snow celebrating  : I prefer they/them/their because they're easier for me to remember.
BIG BAD WOLF Happy July 4th!  : Honestly, I've been using women (or other female characters) in what are typically seen as men (or male character) type roles - hunters, fighter, bounty hunters, and other such Hard roles, and I've been using men in softer roles for quite some time.
For instance, in a recent item, "Dungeon Delving with Werewolves and Vampires," I set up a character, describing them to be strong, muscular - Conan the Barbarian-type. As it turns out, this is merely a Player Character that a Feral Human in my John Wrangler saga had made for a D&D-esque game. (Now, do keep in mind, in the John Wrangler Saga, humans aren't exactly free individuals, save for the Ferals.) A Pet human asks if a player could be something that they are not. The DM, who seems to be open-minded, mentions that they have no issues with the Pet playing as a werewolf or vampire, and indicating that the Feral plays as one on occasion, and that his performances could either be funny, or down-right scary. Then the Pet goes that wasn't the question that he was asking, as he wanted to know if he could play as a female character. At this, the Feral chuckles, and shows the Pet, and their Master His character - a Female Human, based off of the Feral's own grandmother, who was seen as Highly Dangerous.
Personally, what annoys me is when someone "claims" to be inclusive, with females doing "Masculine" work, like having them in the garage, and men doing "Feminine" work, like having them in the kitchen, and doesn't think, "Well, what if, Maybe, Sally Does enjoy the typical Domestic side of things, and Joe Likes doing the Typical Male stuff" - I mean, wouldn't That be just as sexist as always keeping women in the kitchen and men in the garage?
Then there's those Social Justice sorts who see someone accidentally saying something, that was only mildly offensive at worst, and making it out as if the fella that said it was some kind of bigot that should be banned from a platform - a situation I myself was in, and got labeled transphobic and pomophobic for. The funny thing is, not only do I write LGBT-friendly material, I've actually told folks who are of the LGBT community what had happened, including what I'd done - misspelling the LGBT acronym, and they are like, "How was that offensive?"
foxtale : Do your female characters dress in skirts?
Eh? What if Uncle Larry also wears skirts, and he ain't Scottish? Yours - in jest - foxtale
s : I don't feel comfortable oftentimes with some of the inclusivity only because I do not think it is my story to tell. I have included gay and lesbian characters in my stories, because I know quite a few and can ask people for feedback, but I have not included others because I do not know any. For the same reason, there are some religions I do not include because I know no-one who practises them. I need to have some knowledge or know where to get some IRL knowledge before I can include a person, so, unfortunately, my work is not inclusive.
Annette in France  : One of my favorite characters dresses in skirts because it gives her faster access to her dagger that she has strapped to her thigh.
Amethyst Angel🍂🧡  : Well, it depends on my characters. I've written an asexual one, and I'm working on a pregnant one right now, which is a big leap for me (from the first person, no less - and I've never been  I should hope I'm inclusive enough. I don't want my stories to be built on the assumption of an all-white cast of characters, for example.
Chico Mahalo : No, because it reminds me too much of identity politics. Characters should develop organically. They should not be created to satisfy the country's cultural phenomena.
bobconstable: I'm honestly not sure. If I wrote a Superman fanfic, where Jimmy Olsen was still a freckle-faced Caucasian redhead, would that be considered exclusive?
Patata Aterrdora en NM : Yea I tried to do that with Bother, my NaNoWriMo '23 project it didn't read well.
The main character Jeanie's sibling's pronouns are they/them.Jeanie and Dannie's family are Baptist; their parents kind of just ignore that Dannie is genderless. I tried having one of the minor characters go by the form of address Mx. as opposed to Mr./Ms. It confused people badly.
Writing inclusively is hard. Maybe for NaNo this year I'll write about someone with either Delusional Schizophrenia or on the Autism spectrum. But it's hard to do that and still be tasteful. I really admire the writers of movies like "A Beautiful Mind" and TV shows like "The Good Doctor" I think they've done a good job with portraying the diverse behavior that is not neurotypical. Just my opinion.
Anyways, if my some of my family knew I felt that it was okay to identify as LGBTQA+ and that identity is part of that, they'd probably throw a tantrum and call me a "Flaming Liberal." Honestly? Except that the laws that govern society were made decades or centuries ago, I don't think gender identity should even be a political issue! Yeah maybe I'm going to "the hot place" for thinking that it's not my place to say who can and can't be part of a story—or be socially acceptable—but there you have it. They—people and characters— should be allowed to be themselves not some binary or cookie cutter version of humanity.
Joto-Kai : Nope. <clip the boring go down>
Just for interest. So they're mostly white and often bisexual. A few headcannon exceptions that don't count, and some side characters.
I did make somebody less gay for inclusion (he didn't need to weaponize his sexuality, he was bad enough) and Freder was also gay-coded but I decided that he worked because Freder wasn't a villain, just an antagonist. On the page he was morally even with the heroine--two thieve's guildmembers fighting over a prize.
But yeah, mostly explore the diversity of sexuality. Particularly proud of Kissla (Freder's enemy) who loses her boyfriend and the title of Duchess Consort to her girlfriend. But in the end she runs the castle from the shadows, is a closer girlfriend to the Duke. Eventually they decide she should marry both, and Carolie's son will leave it to Kissla's daughter to inherit the duchy.
Although how they're going to explain that Becca should inherit from Kissla when she has been passed off as someone else's daughter I don't know. Haven't got that far.
I need to stop this and get back to writing.
Mousethyme  : I don't think I have ever changed my style of writing in the 40+ years I have been doing it. I have grown with experience, but I don't think that is the same thing.
Jtpete 1986  : When I have a story in mind, characters are created-each with their own personality/characteristics. As the story progresses, the characters grow and develop. Sometimes I have had a side character play a much stronger role than I had first planned - and one other time, I killed off one of the three protagonists because of a choice she made within the story.
Dawn Embers  : I haven't exactly but I've also always written LGBTQIA+ characters. From the very beginning, I've had gay characters and had one who is intersex. I still plan to add more detail to some that include asexual. Think the only change might be when I attempted to work in non-binary, gender neutral for a practice story.
Thanks to everyone responding, it was some really interesting feedback!  Leger~
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Short Stories: September 11, 2024 Issue [#12732]
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