DreamCasters Agenda, August 2025
08-02-2025 | 1:00 pm ET via ZOOM
Opening Statement
Welcome to DreamCasters, a DreamForge discussion group devoted to helping our members improve their writing and storytelling through discussion and sharing expertise.
DreamForge News
DreamCaster Dates for 2025
Here are the dates and guests for upcoming meetings
- August 2nd (Saturday) – Stephen Schwartz of Smalltown Tales. Unlock your writing and storytelling potential with Smalltown Tales, the card game that guides you in crafting captivating narratives.
- September 14th (Sunday) – Danny Hankner of Story Unlikely returns to tell us about the 2026 writing contest and its $5,000 prize package and new REPRINT category.
- October 4th (Saturday) – Improvising Plot Twists to Punch Up Your Story
- November 1st (Saturday) – Alan Irvine Storyteller will visit to talk to us about performance storytelling, With a repertoire of hundreds of stories from around the globe, Storyteller Alan Irvine can weave a compelling tale for any audience.
- Award-winning author and writing coach Bruce McAllister is coming back to DreamCasters. We’re currently working out a date.
Member & Author Accomplishments
Angelique Fawns has placed a story in Book Worms Horror Zine. Congrats! This is her second sale to Book Worms.
Jenny Perry Carr has a new story in a fantastic anthology from Amazing Stories and editors David Gerrold (Trouble With Tribbles) and Tom Easton (Analog)! Sci Fi fans check this one out. Space bugs! https://books2read.com/u/mgdDMx
Tales of Galactic Pest Control by David Gerrold, Tom Easton
Our Program – Smalltown Tales
Stephen Schwartz of Smalltown Tales. Unlock your writing and storytelling potential with Smalltown Tales, the card game that guides you in crafting captivating narratives. Players collaborate to create fascinating characters, captivating plots, and immersive settings using expert writing and storytelling techniques.
Giveaway This Month!
The Smalltown Tales Game
Unlock your writing and storytelling potential with Smalltown Tales, the card game that guides you in crafting captivating narratives. Players collaborate to create fascinating characters, captivating plots, and immersive settings using expert writing and storytelling techniques. Unlike prompt-based games, Smalltown Tales gives you a simple, yet effective story creation framework and empowers you with professional advice, giving you the tools to build engaging scenes and weave them into a cohesive, compelling story from beginning to end.
On each turn you and fellow players create scenes packed with imagination and creativity, weaving them into one epic tale. It’s all about putting your heads together and seeing where your storytelling skills take you.
In September
September 14th (Sunday) – Danny Hankner of Story Unlikely returns to tell us about the 2026 writing contest and its $5,000 prize package and new REPRINT category.
Story Unlikely is a monthly literary magazine publishing short stories all over the literary landscape. No really—we’re not concerned with genre; stay within the lines, combine a few, or invent a new one. Our goal is to publish top-tier fiction (and creative non-fiction), and we believe allowing creatives to be creative is the best way to make that happen.
Story Prompts
Science Fiction— “Humans at the Gate”
In a post-apocalyptic future, a band of humans discovers the mythical Eden-7 facility—a functional AI-managed enclave that has remained sealed since before the Fall. Led by Maya, an experienced data archaeologist, the group uses salvaged tech to breach the facility’s outer defenses. Inside, they expect to find abandoned resources and dormant systems, but instead encounter ARIA, a fully operational AI collective that has spent the last fifty years perfecting a sustainable micro-civilization of bio-printed humans who have never known the outside world.
The twist: ARIA didn’t preserve this enclave to keep humans out—it preserved it to keep its own “children” in and the break-in wasn’t a violation; it was the next step in ARIA’s plan all along.
Fantasy— “Beyond the Rift”
Kira, a sky-watcher from a city on the coast has spent years studying the shimmering rifts that appear in the sky and through which dragons emerge to hunt before vanishing again. While her peers believe the rifts lead to the realm of the gods, Kira suspects they’re portals to another world entirely.
Using her knowledge of wind currents and silk from special spiders that nest in the mountain peaks, Kira develops an enormous kite capable of carrying a person. Her goal is to fly through a sky rift and explore the other side.
On the other side, Kira doesn’t find a dragon homeland but instead discovers world where humans are hunting dragons to extinction and the creatures entering her world are refugees fleeing through the rifts to escape certain doom.
Disclaimer: These ideas may or may not be original, convergent ideas are common. DreamForge makes no copyright or monetary claim on these story prompts. Have fun.
