DreamCasters Agenda,
September 2025

09-14-2025 | 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

• September 14^th (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 4^th (Saturday) – Improvising Plot Twists to Punch Up Your Story
• November 1  (Saturday) – Alan Irvine, Storyteller. Alan is an oral storyteller who will clue is in to story elements that help bring tales alive.
• December 7^th (Sunday) – Award Winning writer and writing coach Bruce McAllister returns to discuss “the shape of the story.”
• We are working with Cat Rambo to find a date for DreamCasters. Cat is a Nebula Award Winning writer, former SFWA president and has over 300 published short stories to her credit.

Our Program – Story Unlikely’s 2026 Writing Contest

September 14^th (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. The magazine is not concerned with genre; you can stay within the lines, combine a few, or invent a new one. Danny’s goal is to publish top-tier fiction (and creative non-fiction), and he believes allowing creatives to be creative is the best way to make that happen.

Giveaway This Month!

Dark Hearts, Edited by Jessica Carver

This is the 22nd Annual Triangulation Anthology. It is the most handsome production by Parsec Ink I have ever seen. Super high quality print.

Dark Hearts is a women-centered featuring speculative stories and poems about women who are anti-heroes. These stories are about shady ladies: women and female-presenting characters breaking the rules, defying social norms, and getting up to no good!

In October

October 4^th (Saturday) – Plot Twists. Let’s talk about them, how to use them to punch up your story, and we’ll improvise some starting with a plot example or two and see if we can twist some plots in exciting ways.

Story Prompts

Science Fiction— “The Drifting Garden”

A massive space habitat, the O’Neill cylinder known as Verdania, has housed stable agricultural settlements for over 3 centuries.

Over the previous decade, wealthy visitors from a larger, capitalist colony have started settling in Verdania. Slowly, the number increases. They are coming for, and then “selling” to others the “peaceful, self-sustaining” vibe of Verdania.  This ends up isolating and pushing the Verdania natives into smaller and smaller, tourist plagued areas.

Verdanian’s fight back by subtly altering cylinder rotation and reprogramming the artificial sun strips – in ways that natives can adapt to but newcomers suffer vertigo and affective seasonal disorder.

Fantasy— “The Arbiters of Eternity”

Imagine a society where humans are considered sacred because of their souls, but there’s a catch. Souls are considered limited in number and must be from reincarnation.  If you don’t show evidence of reincarnation, you are either killed or enslaved by a certain age. But those “without souls” are the dregs of society. Some bright kids can see this coming and fake their soulful place in the world.

The theme of the story is the danger in humans deciding who has right to live and who does not, in who decides which humans are animals and which are not. For a magical element, the protagonist is a young person who can see souls for real and knows that no one else can and their society is hypocritical on the topic.

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.