Once again, I have put out an open call for flash fiction prompts! Go here, post a comment with a few choices of prompt, get fiction! Donations gladly accepted and incentivized, but not required! General information on how I do this, including what donations get you, can be found here.

This month's theme is “flaws” - base your prompts around things that characters might struggle with, even if they're not, by and large, horrible people. Prompts are open from now to the 30th of June, 8 PM Atlantic time.

Go on, have a look, leave a prompt! And if you can throw something in the tip jar, that'd be great too!

-V

It's been entirely too long since my last prompt call. Time to change that!

I may be changing things up in the future, trying to move towards a format of more regular writing than these bursts of it. Details are TBD, but what ruminations I have are with the prompt details, here. Head on over to that link to leave a prompt!

This time around, the "theme" is a bit different. Got a setting of mine you want me to do more work in, or a specific storyline you'd like to see extended? That's the game this time.

Overall information about these prompt calls is here if you're a new reader.

Thanks in advance for your interest!

-V

So, my last prompt call went very smoothly. All my work on it is done, and some other stuff I was working on as well.

I need more!

Trying something a little different; the prompt call is hosted directly on my storyblog, here. If this goes well, it may streamline the process of making future calls. To participate, just head over to that link, and leave a comment with some one-to-two-sentence prompts on the theme of "resolution", and I'll get you something around 500 words (probably on the generous side of it). Donation incentives available, no registration required!

General guidelines are here.

Thanks for reading!

-V

Once again, I'm opening the floor for prompts from which to write some quick blocks of fiction. Base is 500ish words per prompter, with donation incentives available.

Full details are on my LiveJournal here: http://shurhaian.livejournal.com/212681.html

Anonymous comments are open, so you don't need to have an LJ account to make requests - but if you don't, please do sign your post so I can tell people apart.

Prompts run for a week.

Writers, students, and everyone else out there who needs to produce a lot of text: Effective immediately, I will be offering paid proofreading services to those who may feel they need them.

Although I am not a professional editor, I consider myself competent and confident with the English language. Examples of my work are in my gallery; more recent material can be found on my storyblog. I've been published twice, once as Veritas in FANG volume 3 from Bad Dog Books, and in somewhat more mainstream press in Queer Fish volume 2 by Pink Narcissus Press, under my own name. I've completed NaNoWriMo three times, and believe I am fairly skilled at striking a balance between clarity and imagery with words.

(I am not affiliated with either publisher, nor do these services have anything whatsoever to do with them.)

Professional proofreading services can run up above $3 per 250 words for 7-day turnaround – well beyond what most people can justify who just want their work to be cleaned up to post online. I will be offering a much more affordable service: Per 500 words in the initial submission (a little under a full 8 1/2” x 11” page in 12 pt), basic proofreading will be $0.25 CAD. This is for the simplest brand of editing – checking for spelling/grammar mistakes, misuse of homophones, tense consistency, and the like. Copy editing – including a look at word choice, paragraph flow, and overall consistency of style as well as proofreading – will be $0.45. In either case, explicit sexual material will carry a $0.10/500 wd surcharge; merely suggestive material, or material which fades to black without going into detail, will not be subject to this.

Rounding on the word count will be to the nearest 500 words. If it lands exactly on an odd multiple of 250, it will go to the nearest 1000 words. The exception to this is that any piece, however small, will be counted as at least one increment of 500. To reiterate, the word counts will be for the initial submission, not the revised file, whether the count goes up or down.

I have yet to get a feel for the time and effort involved in this process, so rates may change – up or down – as time goes on. Refunds will not be granted due to subsequent price adjustments, nor will rates be adjusted upwards retroactively; once I give a quote and it is accepted, that price will stand. Also until I get a feel for how much volume I can process, I will only guarantee a 7-day turnaround on material up to 10,000 words long; while I will try to complete any submitted work sooner rather than later, right now anything in excess of 10k words will have another 7 days added to the estimate per 10,000 words - for instance, a 25,000 word piece will have an estimated 3-week turnaround. Again, I'll try to finish faster; just be advised that it may take some additional time.

Basic proofing should be easy enough to do for any English-language material. However, copy editing takes more involvement in the material. I reserve the right to refuse to copy-edit a piece if its content makes me too uncomfortable to go into that much detail. My expertise is with prose fiction; while I can still do basic proofreading on academic writing and the like, for anything more involved you will need to employ someone more immersed in the field.

Poetry is not suitable or eligible for this service; a single word different can greatly affect the feel of a carefully-crafted poem, and poetry is not a field in which I consider myself skilled.

Please state with the submission if you want a particular dialect of English to be used. If I see Canadian/UK English forms predominant, odds are I’ll stick to those, with my default otherwise being US English as perhaps the most widely-used; but it’s better to state clearly if you want a particular one to be in place. If it hasn’t come up by then, I will include this query when offering a quote (see below).

If you want to employ my services, please send me a note and I will give you my contact information, with further discussion to take place by email. I will accept documents in Rich Text Format (*.rtf), OpenDocument format (*.odt), or MS Word (*.doc, *.docx), though if Word format proves troublesome I may ask for it to be saved in another format. I will also accept work through Google Drive. In all cases, I will take a word count locally (as all word counters do not use the same algorithm, my count may differ somewhat from yours; I use LibreOffice). If you have asked for copy editing, I will look over the material and determine if I am willing to do so or not. I will provide a quote at this time. If you accept the quote and tell me to go ahead, then and only then will I start work, with the revisions to be completed within seven days. I will include a sample of the revisions with my statement that the work is done, with the full revised document to be sent once payment is received.

At this time, I can only accept payment through PayPal. Payment is to be rendered on receiving notice that the work is complete; I will not withdraw funds prior to this time. I would prefer payment not be remitted until then, for sake of easier bookkeeping.

If you know any (other) writers who may be interested in this service, feel free to direct their attention here.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to doing business.



-Veritas

So I'm sure most people know more about adoptable critters than I do.

But here's some that gain points for A) being ferrets, and B) having some loose genetics that'll dictate what features they have and such. They're breedable, which is the only way any features but the basic are going to show up. Default colors are akin to natural ferret colors, but variations can show up through breeding or if you feel like tossing something the artist's way for a custom one.

So far, I have two of them: Oberon and Titania. (With perhaps more to come shortly.)

More information about them can be found right here.

So  quotingmungo is greatly enamored of a new character of hers, and wants some prompting re: what to do with him. As such, she's got a giveaway of sorts going on for that character in some form or another getting frisky with someone else!

Go take a look at the details in this journal.

But please, for the love of God and cute fluffy kittens, read the directions before putting in a reply.

My last prompt call was successful, so I'm running another right now! Give me a prompt, on the theme of "duality", and receive in exchange about 500 words of flash fiction on that prompt. I have a tipjar for it; donations are optional but have incentives on offer! For more details or to give me some prompts, see this LiveJournal entry. An LJ account is not required to prompt; anonymous commenting is allowed. Prompts run until Thursday afternoon Atlantic time (GMT-4). Come on over, and spread the word while you're at it!

From now until whenever I get a full queue, but for at least a day, I'm offering crowd-prompted flash fiction. Head over here, leave a comment (you don't need to have an account - anonymous comments are OK) with one or more notions for a story, and I'll try to knock out a 500-word fic for at least one of them!

These aren't commissions - I'm not accepting strict guidelines on what to write, just a general theme, and I'm not using anyone else's characters save that I've previously collaborated to make them - but if you want a quick story that fits a particular theme, contains a particular species, or whatever, this might work for you. Donation incentives start at a guarantee of up to five prompts completed, and go up from there (there are some incentives based on total rather than individual donations, too), but donation is entirely optional.

Take a look, spread the word!

Hey, lookie there, it's another chapter of my ongoing serial, Stripes! Without the bigger part of two years between installments! How about that?

As before, the new chapter can be found on my storyblog, here.

For those who haven't seen it, but are interested in written bisexual furry erotica, my intro blurb to the piece is here, and the first installment, here.

Yeah, yeah. Way too long in coming, this. But there's finally been a new installment posted of my ongoing serial fiction, Stripes.

At this time, I do not consider FA's story engine to be an adequate publishing medium, so, sorry, but I won't be posting the series here. (Nor am I going to touch SoFurry with a 39 1/2 foot pole.) However, I will post journals as I make progress(and as I remember to do so).

The latest chapter, "Period of Adjustment", is here, on my WordPress. Note also that said WordPress has an RSS feed attached to it for anyone who wants to follow my sporadic efforts there.

(Edit: And wouldn't you just know - the moment I post this notice, Dreamhost(I believe that's the name of the webhost) goes down for maintenance. Figures. Seems to be back now, though.)

43:03: Defeated Johto Champion. This is faster than my clear time in any of the series to date(I think Emerald took me 72:00, and Pearl was in the 60s).

But I still had more to do, sooooo...

114:29: Defeated Red. Because Mewtwo kicks THAT MUCH ASS.

I am: Veritas, 3009 1212 3155

Well, actually, to those following my LiveJournal, this isn't entirely unfamiliar.

Since none of the story archives out there really satisfy me, I've gone with a separate option: a WordPress blog.

I've been gradually moving material onto it, some old, some new, plans for some rewritten. Just now finished posting the third chapter in a setting that hasn't seen the light of day outside my LJ. The protagonist is the newly-deposed king of the Crandil - subterranean cave-dwellers, chest-high to a human, with somewhat foxlike features and, in addition to sight, hearing, and smell, a magnetic sense that's fine enough to feel the shape of nearby rock and the position of living things. And is thoroughly distorted by iron even in its native state - that much more so when it's worked.

Anyway, without further ado...

Chapter I: The Deep of Rod and Crown
Chapter II: The City of Jewels
Chapter III: The Halls of Soothing Slumber

The blog includes an RSS feed, which may make it a tad easier to keep up with anything I put there.

On the one hand, it seems that courtesy is marginalized on the Internet, and in furry not least of all. Every so often, people will step up to defend artists or other content producers, demanding that other people be patient, wait for material to appear in its own time, because they haven't paid for it etc. Or they will step up to the defense of a website that's suffering downtime - saying, again, "it's free, stop complaining".

The world doesn't work that way.

It's true that the people hoping for updates should be courteous about it - don't pester over-frequently; keep a polite tone in their queries; etc. However, courtesy is not one-sided. A free web site still carries some expectation regarding its quality of service; its users have a right to expect that major issues will be resolved in a reasonably timely fashion, and a right to be irritated if the site goes down for an extended period of time without word.

The last bit is the important part, and the part that's often neglected by providers in furry. Communicate. If you've said something will be done in a week, and ten days go by without further word, people have every right to be irritated. If you're going to be delayed, say so. It doesn't take long, and would avoid a lot of irritation.

"It's free" is not a free ticket to breaking promises. It's understandable if you need to put something down and can't get to it in the timeframe you initially expected - but in that case, you should say so as soon as possible. And if it's at all possible, you shouldn't let deadlines go by without a word.

The people who are viewing your content for free can't demand repayment for the nothing they paid. They can't insist that you stick to a deadline when there are more urgent matters - actual jobs, family or medical crises, whatever - demanding your attention. But if you're not going to do them the courtesy of keeping them updated on why things are behind(and ideally, when you might expect to catch again), you have no reason to expect courtesy from them in turn; you have forfeited that right.

Right, so... indeed, I haven't put much here, and nothing in a long time.

The reason for that is simple: I am an author, not an artist, and the story interface is HORRIBLE.

Author notes beneath the story just don't work if I want to give an idea of what the story is about. And with only plain text going inline, well... no. Just no. I don't want to force people into the separate step of downloading a file just so I can put, say, a first-line indent to make it not just a solid wall of hardly-readable text.

My recent work is scattered through a few places.

Most of my finished stuff is on Yiffstar, here:

http://yiffstar.com/stories/Veritas

I have a few pieces on Furrag:

http://www.furrag.com/viewuser.php?uid=271

...one of which is also on Yiffstar, one of which is not.

I don't know where I'm going to put stories going forward. To say I'm skeptical of SoFurry, as both those sites are becoming, would be like saying that scaling Mount Everest is a bit of a hike.

I've also posted portions of pieces, and links to some finished works by way of Google Docs, on my LiveJournal:

http://shurhaian.livejournal.com

In fact, for the last few years, that's basically been what my journal has been for; there have been very few entries that weren't little bits and pieces(or longer pieces) of writing.

Currently, I'm working on NaNoWriMo ( http://www.nanowrimo.org ), so I'm not likely to produce much new apart from that. After November, I suppose I really should try to organize my writing... though what form that'll take, I don't know.

At any rate, my NaNo piece, which as of this writing has come just shy of 13K words out of a 50K target, is here:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dck9wbvj_46sckptkc2

It's got gay twincestuous teenage dragon sex, so far. Well, anthro-dragon mutual self-stimulation, but more should be imminent...

I won't be doing my main editing in Google Docs, so that will be updated now and then as I get to it - most likely at the end of a writing session. There's a planned meet for local NaNo-ers this Wednesday evening AST, so there may be more to see by then if not before.

Does anyone out there have a Rhydon with a Protector that they'd be willing to trade for same, to evolve into Rhyperior? Comment or note me.

Alright, so. I can't draw, but here's my idea for a Poke-Combat Academy team anyway. (Not that I think much will come of it, since I can't afford to commission them...)

Team Prism, placing emphasis on versatility, not just as a team, but individually. Team symbol is not unlike a Poké ball, but the part that would normally be red instead sweeps from red (at the "left" when the white part is on the bottom) to violet.

I'll flesh out the team members in detail once I have access to a good Pokedex(crippled 'net connection where I am now), but for now...

TEAM PRISM - GRADE: SOPHOMORE

Spectrum "Spec" Vari - Eevee
Named for a quirk of his fur: each strand is tipped with a clear section that diffracts light, resulting in a prismatic sheen - especially on the paler sections. Spec, like many of his breed, is a bit on the small side, but it'd be a mistake to think of him as weak. He's fast, agile, and resilient, capable of taking a surprising amount of punishment - and dishing it out in turn. Spec is both the team's captain and it's living banner. He wears a choker bearing shards from a number of elemental stones. One of these rocks seems out of place - a dull, pitted, rough, opaque stone of a simple grey - but is in fact its centerpiece: a hunk of Everstone. Spec tries to push the limits of his kind to to see just how much he can take advantage of an Eevee's genetic variability without permanently evolving.
Academically the weakest of the lot - not so much because he isn't capable or interested, but because he's so much MORE interested in exploring the limits of his body in the arena - Spec, while by no means stupid, often has to crib notes from his teammates to keep a satisfactory grade.

Experimental Data Entity 573 v2 - EDE 573-2, "Eddie" - Porygon2
The team's resident tech-head. It's not so much that he (for lack of a better pronoun; though technically sexless, Eddie tends to come across as male) is fixated on high-technology; it's that the ability to directly download information, coupled with the lack of any need to sleep, eat, or even breathe, lets Eddie, despite his fair amount of leisure time, spend far more time learning - and doing so more efficiently - than most other students.
Program or no, Eddie finds the more physical aspects of life fascinating. This includes not only the arena - in which his ability to "borrow" from his opponent's strengths, via his Download ability, and his ability to reconfigure to resist attacks with his Conversion moves, combine with his rapid, complex strategizing to make him a force to be reckoned with - but also downtime; he can't get drunk per se, but that doesn't keep him from going out with his friends. And occasionally trying to drop hints to Spec that there's some more physicality he'd like to experiment with - hints which the poor Eevee, certain he can't be reading them right, proceeds to gloss over.

Beryl Tenebrae - Sableye
Beryl's main strength is straightforward: psychic and conventional, physical attacks (Normal and Fighting) usually can't even touch him, and there's nothing else he's especially vulnerable to. His selection of techniques is varied - not just in their elemental types, but in that about as many are physical as special. He's most fond, however, of putting his razor-sharp, diamond-hard claws to good use, thinking that lobbing a Shadow Ball from a distance would make someone too detached from what they're actually doing when on the arena floor.
Though capable in the ring, his main strength is, somewhat predictably, in Geology, and the physical sciences in general. Since jewels are rather hard to come by on the surface, his family tends to send him a regular care package of low-grade gems to munch on. The prettier ones, however, he tends to set aside as gifts for those light-dwelling mortals that he finds so fascinating - male and female alike, though one female has captivated his attention of late.

...I was initially going to try for one from each generation, but decided to instead just pick someone from a rare elemental type. So.

Tina Glace - Walrein
The only female on the team(excepting Eddie/Edie in some of its rarer moods), but anyone who thinks her weak because of it is in for a very nasty surprise. Tina is the only one on the team who has a definite focus in the arena, but that focus has sometimes lead to an upset victory on her or her team's part - because most dragons out there, otherwise powerful foes, are incredibly vulnerable to her frigid assault, and even the defensively-strong Rock types are liable to be battered apart.
She's a heavyset girl, and not just because of the blubber common to her species - underneath that insulating layer is an amount of muscle many people don't even guess at until they're sprawled out aching on the floor. Though not terribly nimble, she's tough, and she's quite good at throwing her weight around..
She also has a keen interest in climatology - perhaps not surprising in a family that always has to be aware of what the weather's going to do to the ice floe that's making up their home for the time being, but she takes it farther than mere obligation would demand. In recent years that's branched out to Geography in general - and it's in one such class that she met her current boyfriend of some years, an unlikely partner by the name of Beryl.

Okay, so.

I beat the Champ at 67:23 play time. Beat my Emerald time by 4 hours, 37 minutes. Whee.

I am:

[updated due to new DS]
Veritas 4382 7081 4251

Comment or note me if you want to do something. I have all three starters and can breed them, so... :)

Yes, I finally brought my stuff over here. It's been on Yiffstar for a while now, and three of the four were on FurAffinity before, but I just now got around to uploading them here.

The four stories I've put up so far (Under the Table, Squad Training, Reprisal, and Personal Touch) are all in the same setting, though only two stories feature recurring characters so far. They're also, so far, in chronological order.

Hopefully, more will follow - if my muse co-operates.

Oh, yeah... if someone could let me know whether stories are showing up in Watch lists(either mine or in general), I'd appreciate it.