Standard Disclaimers

Prompt Responses

I enjoy writing prompt responses! I find that they mix an unexpected inspiration with a form of creative constraint in a way that's conducive to some very interesting finished products – products which I might not have gotten to on my own. Prompters should, however, be aware of a few things going into the prompting relationship:

  1. There are things I will not write. Stories which are set up to dehumanize entire populations, stories with strong sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, abelist, etc. messages, and other story premises which I don't want to give my name to will not be written. And there are prompts which I'm vanishingly unlikely to write: erotica, for example. (Trust me, we're both better off if I just don't.) (Unless you really like awkward and clinical depictions of sex.) Some prompts may take too much time and effort for my current workload: historical fiction, for example, requires more research than I'm always able to dedicate to it. If a prompter asks for something I cannot or will not write, I reserve the right to ignore those aspects of the prompt. Or to, in a fit of pique, write the exact opposite.
  2. I may not write the story you want to see. Prompts are jumping-off points, not functional design documents. If you ask for a lady in a tower guarded by a dragon, and the idea that hits me is a lady on an abandoned space station guarded by a malfunctioning AI which is metaphorically a dragon, that's still a fill for the prompt. If you want to be able to dictate setting, characters, plot events, and things on that level, that's a commissioned story and not a prompt response, and will need to be negotiated separately.
  3. All rights remain with me unless otherwise negotiated. Ideas can't be copyrighted. If you give me a prompt and I write a story to it, it's still my story – and you're free to write your own story on the prompt, if you want to. Depending on the prompt call, I may want to pursue traditional publishing with the story I write, so even if you get a personal first look at the work, you cannot post, share, or sell it without my permission.

That said, I hope that writing prompt fills is a fun experience for myself and for my prompters. Hopefully we can all be pleasantly surprised with what comes out of the process!