DreamCasters Agenda,
May 2025

05-03-2025 | 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

• May 3^rd, 2025 (Saturday) – 3,000 Word Short Story Challenge for DreamCasters only. We’re going to launch a Short Story Writing Contest with $325 in prizes. We’ll go over the goals, the objective, and brainstorm ideas. You can start writing now by downloading the Short Story Development Guide on this page.
• June 8^th (Sunday) – Alex Jennings. Alex is the Program Director of DreamFoundry’s Con or Bust and pens a regular speculative poetry review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction called “Chapter and Verse.”

Member & Author Accomplishments

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

Our Program – The DreamForge 3,000-Word Story Challenge

One of the toughest things in writing is developing an engaging short story at a length of 2,500 to 3,000 words. At the same time, for a well-crafted story, that word-length is among the easiest to sell to almost any venue.

Our goal here is to provide our DreamCaster supporters with a 3,000 word Story Writing Challenge that walks the writer through a 3 Phase approach to Developing, Drafting, and Revising a short story.

The challenge is open to DreamCasters only and to all varieties of speculative fiction. While positive and DreamForge style stories are appreciated, write what works best for you, even horror and apocalyptic fiction if you want. The goal is to help you develop a story you can submit anywhere.

Story length: 2500 to 3200 words is acceptable for our “3,000 Word Writing Challenge.”

 $ Prizes $

There are prizes. After reviewing all DreamCaster submitted stories, DreamForge Editor Scot Noel will award First, Second, and Third place prizes of $175, $100, and $50 respectively. Prizes have no strings attached, and any stories submitted to the contest can be submitted to the venue of your choice for possible publication., including DreamForge during our next submission period. We want to help you write a good story— then let’s see how many of these stories we can sell!

Timelines and Submission

For this Writing Challenge, the deadline for submission is June 01, 2025. Both submissions and any questions are emailed directly to Scot.Noel@DreamForgeMagazine.com.  Note: Since it is a competition, submitting early doesn’t help. All stories will be judged against all competition in June. So teake the time to develop your best.

STORY GUIDE – Stories Developed by the Rules

Over the years, we’ve written articles on plotting structure, character development, opening lines, dialog, story beats, and more. The concepts we’ve covered in the Writing Challenge Story Guide you can download here: WRITING CHALLENGE STORY DEVELOPMENT GUIDE.

This guide is divided into three phases:

1. Planning: Develop your core story elements
2. Drafting: Write your story section by section
3. Revision: Refine your work to ensure structural and thematic coherence

Each section includes explanation, examples, guiding questions, and word count targets to help you craft your narrative within the constraint of 3,000 words.

SPECIAL NOTES: This kind of story development isn’t for everyone. You don’t have to use our Story Development Guide to create your Writing Challenge entry, but you should note that your story will be judged according to the criteria of the Guide, so… At the very least, you might want to consider your story against the Checklists available under the Drafting phase.  YOU ARE NOT SUBMITTING YOUR WRITING GUIDE AS A WORKSHEET. Just to be clear, you are submitting your completed story. The Story Development Guide is just that – a guide.

Documents Scot Reviewed with DreamCasters at May Meeting.

If you were at the meeting, you know Scot has a first draft of his story, which he worked through the Story Development Guide template and checklist.  I have 3 documents with regard to that I can share:

Elements of the Story broken out in a Guide Checklist: 01-Muselink-Story-Development-V01.pdf

A Plot Summary of the (close to) final story: 02-Plot-Summary-V01.pdf

The first draft of the story, with notes at the end for the Revision Phase: 03-Muselink-Story-Draft-V01.pdf

Giveaway This Month!

One Lucky DreamCaster in attendance will Win:

“What We Still Talk About,” by Scot Edelman

One of our favorite DreamForge authors, and the SF magazine editor who sat down with us to discuss DreamForge’s creation in the beginning, Scott Edelman has delivered a wonderful collection of thought and emotion provoking short stories in “What We Talk About.”

“Like some reature out of Star Trek, Scott Edelman projects a zone of distortion that elevates all existence within its influence to the realm of the surreal” – Adam-Troy Castro.

In June

June 8^th (Sunday) – Alex Jennings. Alex Jennings is a writer/editor/teacher/poet living in Baton Rouge. He was born in Wiesbaden (Germany) and raised in Gaborone (Botswana), Tunis (Tunisia), Paramaribo (Surinam) and the United States. He is the Program Director of DreamFoundry’s Con or Bust and pens a regular speculative poetry review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction called “Chapter and Verse.” In 2022, he was the inaugural recipient of the Imagination Unbound Fellowship at Under the Volcano, a guided writing retreat held annually in Tepoztlan, Mexico. https://www.alexjennings.net

Story Prompts

Science Fiction— “Dark Matter Star”

When an astrophysicist joins an expedition to study a newly discovered “Dark Star,” she discovers an entire ecosystem thriving in the star’s twilight corona, sustained by dark matter annihilations. Her breakthrough is complicated by the discovery of an abandoned alien vessel containing a robotic body designed to house a Dark Star intelligence. As corporate interests move to exploit this cosmic phenomenon, the robot activates. Inhabited by “Penumbra,” an ancient consciousness from the Dark Star itself, the robot makes the visitors aware that human experimentation threatens not only the delicate dark matter ecosystem but potentially the fabric of spacetime itself.

Fantasy— “The Infinite Ladle.”

In a drought-stricken village, an herbalist inherits their grandmother’s tarnished copper ladle, discovering it possesses the magical ability to serve endless portions of whatever was last put into it—with each subsequent dip transforming the substance into increasingly potent variations. The herbalist quietly experiments with the ladle’s properties, eventually discovering that if they can acquire a ladle of water from the nearly dry village well, it can be transformed through multiple dippings, creating a substance that can nourish the soil and summon rain.

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.