Valkyrie

The only true clam chowdah is from New England. Manhattan is also excluded so no discrimination there

@astone2292 and @Parker OwensI'm looking at you guys for #86

I love a good play on words, which is why I like Dad jokes and memes with puns. Don't judge me... someone has to laugh at them! Disclaimer: I'm not responsible for any eye strain or facial bruising caused by excessive from any stories inspired by these prompts. PT Prompt #85: Sometimes words have very different meanings across languages. For example, the word "gift" in English means something given to another person without expectation of payment, synonymous with "present". In German, however, it has a much darker meaning - a "gift" in German means "poison". Write a scenario where your character uses a word incorrectly in a language foreign to them and what happens based on the miscommunication. PT Prompt #86: Everybody loves a good pun, right? Write a story riddled with puns. The more groan-inducing and facepalming the better.

You are in for quite the ride from this point forward

Based on the results of the polls I created a couple of weeks ago, I have created two new polls to further narrow down our choices for next year as far as number and type of anthologies/contests, and what you would like to see as far as themes go. The polls will be open for two weeks, then will be closed.

Homemade is the only way to go. Soup is so easy to make and so much better than the canned crap. I make broccoli cheese and butternut squash soup all the time. I also have a great recipe for zuppa toscana.

I have a saying: It's never too cold for ice cream or too hot for soup 😁 I love beef barley soup too. I would agree with you about every soup on the planet, but for me there is a definite exception, and that's split pea soup or any soup with little green puke spheres in them

How do you like your eggs? Scrambled? Over-medium? - I love eggs and like them pretty much any way. Scrambled with bacon and Swiss, a nice runny yolk fried egg, or deviled would be my favorites. What is your favorite story on Gay Authors, and why? - ooo that's a tough one. In the Fishbowl by Domluka, Red Running Shoes by @Aditus, and Bound and Bound, the Curse and the Captives by @AC Benus are some that have really stuck with me throughout the years. What brought you to GA? - I am a huge Rob Colton fan and he mentioned he also had stories posted here on another site, so I checked it out and never looked back. If your life was a book, what would be the title? - Perseverance - A Journey of Self-Discovery What is your favorite soup? - another tough one because I love soup! I would say it's a toss up between broccoli, ham, and cheese, and butternut squash soup.

It's always great seeing these guys! They need their own, longer story 😁

This sums everything up perfectly.

There's also a Valentine's Day short, called Happy Galentine's Day, I believe. I'd have to look. Thanks for the plug!

I think they both definitely needed it.

Liam's a smart guy. Thanks I'm glad you liked the chapter. You make a lot of good points.

It was a fun first date As for the rest...

Yeah, that would have been the polite thing to do.

Me too! I had so much fun writing Jody. I think you'll like him as the story progresses.

BTW, I love the fact that you had to comment before the chapter was even finished. Roger definitely provoked a lot of response in this story. @raven1 had some great comments for this story. Thanks for all the comments so far!

Yes, they do. Thank you! And I agree with you about them. We'll see what happens

Agreed, but sometimes we do stupid stuff that's out of character. Galen is the personification of that. Thanks!

much more I don't recommend reading when you're hungry

Buckle up, you're in for one heck of a ride! You will be very glad once you get to the later chapters. There may or may not be several cliffhangers Thank you for taking the time to comment. It was nice to wake up to so many notifications today!

Exactly! The theme doesn't have to beat us over the head. It just needs to be there in spirit.

While it feels like just yesterday when I approached Aditus and Cole Matthews about working together to continue offering GA prompts on a weekly basis, it’s actually been one year! To celebrate our one-year anniversary, we thought we’d pay homage to GA’s late prompt guru, Comicfan, by choosing our favorite prompts created by Wayne. Aditus: Comicfan’s prompt #213 made me put my toe in the water and write a very short story. I got so many encouraging comments that I dared to write an anthology story a few months later. Since then, I’ve always looked forward to reading the prompts. Many times, they helped to get my lazy muse in motion. I don’t know if I’d otherwise ever become an author here on GA. Thank you, Wayne. My favorite prompt is#892. Cole Matthews: This prompt is my favorite, because not only did this prompt give me a character sketch to start a story. It created an entirely new storyline with some of the best characters I've ever created. For some reason, this 'first line' prompt gave me a vision of a man being berated by his son. The prompt I wrote is called The Truck, and it gave me a precocious teenager scolding his father, who we discover is gay and has been hiding it. It was a coming out by a father to his son, a very different tack to the usual trope. Not only did this provide the beginnings of "The Art of Being Gay" but it led me to start viewing characters and storylines in a completely different direction. Comicfan's prompts provided me with the challenge, and the creative spark, to get me to take more chances, try new things, and I grew enormously because of his help and dedication to writing. Valkyrie: It's almost impossible to choose a favorite out of Wayne's prompts. His prompts inspired me to start writing, and the feedback I received encouraged me to continue. My first multi-chapter story was inspired by a prompt, but I chose one that inspired my second story instead. It's one of my favorite prompt stories from my early collection. I always enjoyed Wayne's word lists and seeing how I could fit them all into a story in a natural way.

I'd like to thank everyone who participated in the polls I posted last week about the number of themes and anthologies for next year. There was some interesting discussion, and I will be taking a close look at all the comments and the poll results this weekend and will open up further discussion in next week's anthology blog. This week, we have a guest blog post written by @CassieQ about her take on writing for themes. She's given us some great food for thought when it comes to writing for anthologies. So, you’re thinking about writing for the anthology. Awesome. They are a lot of fun, a great way to expand your skills and garner new readers. Go for it. The problem? The themes. I get it. Sometimes the themes are awesome and resonate with you and you can’t wait to get words on paper. Sometimes, they just don’t. That’s what I’m going to talk about. First point, please remember the anthologies are inclusive and not exclusive. If your story only kinda matches the theme, it’s fine. It doesn’t have to be a literal interpretation, unless that is what you like, in which case, go for it. You do you. Every year, we vote on themes, and every year, I look at them, sigh and think I can’t write for those. 18 anthologies later, here I am. Before I get into the brainstorming section of this, I want to note that these methods work for me when trying to come up with story ideas, and that they may not work for everyone, and there are many different ways to come up with ideas. Furthermore, I am very much a pantser when it comes to writing and abhor planning of any kind. Therefore, I would love to hear from other people about their brainstorming methods, and especially from plotters. So, you have the themes in front of you and you’re not crazy about them. First, decide between the two themes. You may not like either one of them, but there is usually one that is worse than the other. Get rid of that guy. (Unless you want to write for both, in which case, go for it. If you know a way to do so without feeling like your brain is melting, hit me up). Okay. So you have a “meh” kind of theme. I have 2 methods for coming up with ideas. The one I use the most often is the less exciting. I just toss it the in back of my mind and let it marinate there for a while. Think about it absently when doing other things…showering, driving, walking the dog, pretending to listen to your boss/teacher, stuff like that. After a few days, I’ll usually get an idea about a scene or character that I can start building from. You can outline from there, if you are an outliner, which I am not, so it’s usually just a messy jumble for me, but it’s something I can work with. I like that method because I’m lazy and it’s easy. There are some things I like to be hard, but this isn’t one of them. (Yes, I 100% meant that the way it sounded). If that method doesn’t work, then I go for the mind map. (I don’t know if my method is genuine mind map, but it looks close enough for me). So, I am going to describe the methods I used for coming up with an idea for a themed contest using a mind map. I busted out a large sheet of paper and some markers because it’s more fun that way. The theme was “Summer”, so I wrote that in the middle. I already knew I was going to look at summer vacation themes, so I wrote that down too. Then I drew fours lines branching off from the main theme, like the spokes of a wheel and labeled them. The labels were “camping” “road trip” “beach” and “meeting a summer fling”, all things that can happen during the summer. The camping idea died first. I’m not a fan of camping, nor of writing about it. Nothing wrong with camping, I’m sure it’s fun for some people, I am just not one of them. The “road trip” idea spun into an idea about fixing a troubled relationship and then into four more spokes about what might cause a troubled relationship. It was an interesting concept to explore but didn’t really excite me. That left “meeting a summer fling” and “beach”. I elaborated on both of them. The “beach” idea had another spoke that lead to “friendship into lovers”, then two more off from that idea: “near drowning” and “drunken escapades”. Sounds like fun. The “summer fling” idea had two lines branching off, one reading “fall in love” and another reading “solve a mystery?” (I guess I had reservations about it). From the “solve a mystery?” idea was another line, leading to an idea about a light house mystery. I ended up going with the lighthouse mystery as my main idea, but I liked the ones from the beach idea so much that I ended up including those (with the exception of drunken escapades, as my characters were teenagers). Those ideas developed into a novella called Geist, which is up in the Premium section. I used this a lot when I was staring out, but not often now. I typically utilize it when I am struggling to come up with idea. It’s fun, though, because it often yields ideas I wasn’t otherwise considering. At this point, some writers could start planning or outlining. If you’re me, it’s throwing words at the paper and hoping they make sense. So, if someone is struggling with the themes, I hope this helps you out. If not, then I just spent 20 minutes typing to myself, which is fun too. Also, please let me know your methods of brainstorming in the comments, I would love to hear from other writers!