DreamCasters Agenda,
June 2024

06-01-2024 | 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 2024

Here are the dates and guests for the next three months.

• July 7 (Sunday) – Writing Exercise with “The Five Fold Process”
• August 11^th (Sunday) – Award Winning SF and Fantasy Poet Mary Soon Lee
• September 8^th (Sunday) – Danny Hankner of Story Unlikely

Member Accomplishments

Tell the team about any new publications, awards, or accomplishments you might have. If you get news to me at Scot.Noel@DreamForgeMagazine.com, I’ll make sure to mention it.

Wulf Moon

Wulf had four pro sales in May: two in nonfiction and two in fiction.

My fiction sales were to StoryUnlikely Magazine, and to Third Flatiron’s OFFSHOOTS: HUMANITY TWIGGED anthology. Wulf’s OFFSHOOTS sale was “Pink Pickled Pixies,” a story he created from a DreamCaster writing exercise last year, using our story template.

And my Super Secrets of Writing book HOW TO WRITE A HOWLING GOOD STORY has now passed six months since release. It was the #1 New Release in Amazon’s Fiction Writing books category for most of six weeks, and it’s been on Amazon’s Top 100 Best Sellers List in this category almost every day for the past six plus months.

The top writing books are in this category—books by Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Joanna Penn—so it’s no small category to have remained a bestseller on for so long. It’s also been on Draft2Digital’s Top 25 Weekly Best Sellers list of all nonfiction titles (not just creative writing books) six times since release, the latest being a week ago. And it earned Best Nonfiction Book published in 2023 in the Critters Readers’ Choice Awards.

The full DreamCaster gallery of published stories is online at Airtable.

Our Program – E.E. King

Elizabeth Eve King, aka E.E. King, is an award-winning painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called Elizabeth’s stories, “marvelously inventive, wildly funny, and deeply thought-provoking.”

E.E. King has been published in over 100 magazines and anthologies, including Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Short Edition, and Flametree.  Her novels include Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife: All you need to know to choose the right heaven, and several story collections. Her short story The Lost Village appeared in DreamForge in 2023 – https://bit.ly/the-lost-village-ee-king.  Her art has been collected internationally.  Elizabeth has painted murals in California, Mexico, Spain, and Italy, and shown her paintings at the LA Contemporary Museum of Art.

Elizabeth also co-hosts The Long-Lost Friends Show on Metastellar YouTube and spends summers doing bird rescue and winters planting coral.

Elizabeth will talk with us about her new novel “Gods and Monsters,” being serialized at Metastellar Magazine. https://www.metastellar.com/   We’ll learn about the novel, Metastellar magazine, and E.E, King’s readings of each chapter on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7LdNxnZtN4NewB9nH7XmjysFJf-O2bbF

Giveaway This Month!

This month one of our attending DreamCasters will win a paperback of “Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife: All you need to know to choose the right heaven,” by E.E. King.

“This is the most delightful book this reviewer has read in a while…. Evie King does a masterful job at mixing short vignettes of Dirk’s experience with the Devil, his travels to the many heavens, his newly discovered lover, and the factual descriptions of the final paradise of each faith. The Guide to the Afterlife is a mixture of fact and fiction, faith and mysticism at its best.”

In July

In July we’ll take a look at “The Five Fold Passage” and do some improv writing.

The Five Fold Passage provides a simple path to overcoming writer’s block and advancing your story when inspiration seems distant. It’s a structured writing technique that involves focusing on five distinct elements to enrich a scene and propel the narrative forward. These elements include Vision, Extra-Ocular Senses, Emotion, Perception, and Plot Step— each designed to help writers visualize and describe their scenes more effectively. (Article on this coming up in June in DreamForge Anvil, Issue 16.)

################

Story Prompts

Science Fiction— Imagine a future where weather and climate control exist worldwide. There is no longer any concern about climate change leading to bad results. However, a resistance group is dedicated to destroying man-made climate controls under the banner of “Earth’s Weather Belongs to Nature!”  Explore the tension of whether or not such a belief is supportable, and how characters’ ideologies influence their perception.

Fantasy— Imagine a magic system where the power of magic belongs only to certain animal species and not to humans. These are ordinary animals, just being animals, but they can wield some level of magic as they wish. i.e., how would the world be different if you could train your dog to transform lead into gold in exchange for a treat?

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.