Category: wss366

rosary

Most mornings, I write a brief story fragment for Wandering Shop Stories as a warm-up for my day’s creative activities. Sometimes, I use these directly as a rough draft or outlining tool for my current works-in-progress. Often, they’re just one-offs or fan fiction/literary canon of my existing work.

Since January, however, I’ve been struggling. I really haven’t hit my stride writing since my son was hospitalized. We’ve had a lot of stuff going on and my head just wasn’t in the right place. Some days, I couldn’t post anything at all. When I could, it often wasn’t until late at night. And I was frequently dissatisfied with the quality of what I was writing.

Things have been getting better. And just recently, I’ve finally felt like I’m starting to hit what I’m aiming at.

Last fall, before things went south, I wrote a few story fragments about the Hero and the Demon Lord. Here is the first series:

“What’s even the point of this?” the Demon Lord said.
“Ssh,” said the Hero as he cast his line out again.
They sat together at the shore of the lake. There was a quiet plunk as the bobber landed in the water. Ripples radiated out and then settled down.
“You know I can just cast death on the fish and…”
“You shall do no such thing.”
A ripple appeared around the bobber. Once. Twice. Then it dove under the water.
The Hero pulled back on the rod. The bobber and hook popped up, bait gone. The Hero pulled another worm out of the bait can.
“At this rate, we’ll never get lunch,” the Demon Lord said.
“Look in the basket under your seat,” the Hero said.
The Demon Lord pulled out the basket and opened it.
“Sandwiches?”
“And beer. Isn’t this better than fighting to the death?”

“What kind of sandwich is this?” the Demon Lord asked.
“It’s a tasty sandwich,” the Hero explained helpfully
The Demon Lord unwrapped it and inspected it skeptically.
“Try it!” the Hero encouraged.
The Demon Lord took a small bite. And then a larger one.
“An interesting flavor…” he said, as he chewed.
“Right?”
“So what is it?”
“It’s bang bang chicken.”
“You made this yourself?”
“Oh, no. My mother made it.”
“Your mother!?”
“Only the best for my friends.” The Hero smiled. “At least I hope we’ll soon be friends.”
The Demon Lord scowled.

“Well,” the Demon Lord said, getting to his feet. “It’s been fun, I guess…”
“You’re not going to eat and bolt, are you?” the Hero said, pained.
The Demon Lord settled back into his seat, grumbling.
“Look!” he growled. “Maybe you don’t have anything better to do all day, but I…”
“Pish posh,” the Hero said, casting the line again. “Your minions can run things just fine without you for an afternoon. When was the last time you took a day for yourself?”
“But…”
“Besides, you haven’t had dessert yet.”
“Dessert?”
The hero gestured and a group of people approached.
Carrying a cake with candles, they began to sing Happy Birthday.
“It’s not my birthday!” the Demon Lord barked.
“Do you even have a birthday?”
“Well, no…”
“So, today is as good as any.”
“What kind of cake is it?” he said, eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“Why, devil’s food. Of course!”

“Blow out the candles! Blow out the candles!” everyone called.
The Demon Lord scowled, but then blew out the candles and everyone clapped.
“Are you really sure that’s sanitary?” he mumbled, as they produced a stack of paper plates and plastic forks.
“Well?” asked the Hero.
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to cut the cake?”
“With what?”
“Ah! I thought you’d never ask!” the Hero laughed. “Here!”
The Hero offered the Demon Lord an elaborate knife. It seemed to glow blue with an inner light.
The Demon Lord eyed it suspiciously.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s Cakecrist,” the Hero said. “The Frosting Cleaver — Made by the elves, you know.”
The Demon Lord extended a finger and tentatively touched the knife. There was a spark and a curl of smoke rose up. He jerked his hand back.
“I think I’ll let you cut the cake,” the Demon Lord said.

The Hero stood on the dock and watched while the firemen worked to contain the raging inferno where the lake cabin had once stood.
“I’m afraid it’s a complete loss,” the Captain said.
“It’s not a complete loss,” the Hero clarified. “We learned a lot.”
“What did we learn?”
“Well… We learned he doesn’t like fishing and he likes cake. Oh! And that he hates surprises.”
The Captain stared at the Hero for a moment, then sighed and looked away.
“It was bound to end this way,” he said.
“What do you mean?” the Hero said “End? We’ve got another date next week!”

The Hero and Demon Lord are tropes from Japanese manga. They appear constantly in all sorts of different forms. I’m by no means the first to “ship” the Hero and Demon Lord. In Gachi Koi Maou-Sama, for example, the Demon Lord is a cute girl that has a crush on the Hero. There are undoubtedly dozens — or hundreds — of manga that have the Hero and Demon Lord as characters. Sometimes they act according to their stereotypical nature but, just as often, they’re used to subvert the standard paradigm and do something unexpected.

Just recently, I decided to pick them up again and I’ve been pleased with some of the results — as pleased as with anything I’ve written for a long time.

After vanquishing the dread Spectre of Despair, the hero was feted with a parade through the town. As he passed by, a boy called out from the crowd.
“Hero! Hero! What’s the name of your sword?”
The hero paused a moment, then replied, “It doesn’t have a name. It’s just my sword.”
“Awww!” the boy said, disappointed.
“I’ll tell you what,” the hero said. “If you think of a cool name, I’ll name my sword that in your honor.”
The boy’s face lit up with excitement.
The hero waited while the boy wracked his brain for a cool name. The crowd grew silent with anticipation.
“I’ve got it!” the boy crowed. “Swordy McSwordface!”
“Swordy McSwordface! Swordy McSwordface!” the crowd chanted.
The hero drew Swordy McSwordface and broke the blade over his knee.
“I’ll get a new sword,” he said.

The Hero arrived to visit the Demon Lord for coffee. He was ushered into the Demon Lord’s breakfast nook. The Demon Lord looked up from his paper and warmly greeted the Hero.
“How would you like your coffee?” asked the maid. She was a charming lass of 16 or 17 with rosy cheeks.
“I’ll take it with a little cream,” said the Hero.
“And would you care for some coffee cake?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She made a bob, backed away from the table with her eyes downcast, then turned and left the room.
“So…” the Demon Lord asked. “What do you think of my new monster?”
“Monster?” The Hero regarded him quizzically. “What monster?”
The Demon Lord pointed after the maid.
“Her? But she’s just a girl!”
“Exactly,” the Demon Lord exulted.

“What!?” The Captain of the Holy Order of Knights was incredulous. He stared disbelievingly at the knight who had just delivered the report. “Did I hear you correctly? You’d better repeat that.”
“I said,” the knight reiterated, “that the Hero is having breakfast with the Demon Lord.”
The Captain rubbed his hand all over his face as he tried to digest this.
“Who told you this?” he asked finally.
“The Hero told me.”
“The Hero told you? Himself?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say, exactly.”
“To the best of my recollection, he said, ‘I’m having breakfast with the Demon Lord.'”
“Hmm. No chance of a misunderstanding? He didn’t say, for example, ‘I’m having breakfast with the semen gourd’?”
“No. I also saw him go into the Demon Lord’s castle.”
The Captain sighed.
Just then the Hero entered.
“Did you really have breakfast with the Demon Lord?” the Captain asked.
“Yes,” the Hero replied. “He showed me his new monster.”
“Oh! You were collecting intelligence! How scary was the monster?”
The Hero caught sight of his reflection in a mirror and wiped a bit of lipstick off his cheek.
“Terrifying!” he answered, in a low voice.

The Demon Lord chuckled, rubbing his hands together. The Maid touched up her lipstick using the mirror in a compact.
“Did something good happen?” asked Jaygor.
“Everything is going according to plan!”
The Demon Lord clenched his fist. “Soon the Hero will be on his knees, nothing more than a quivering mass of gelatinous slime!”
“Pardon me, Demon Lord,” the Maid said. “I think your plan will have a better chance of success if I can make a few purchases.”
“Oh?” he said, interested.
“Yes. Just a few details, really — to enhance the effect.”
“How much will all this cost?” asked Jaygor.
The Maid batted her eyes. “Hardly anything!” she said.
The Demon Lord got out his billfold and began to extract some bills, but the Maid reached over and pulled out his credit card.
“I’ll be back later,” she said, and blew him a kiss. She slipped out the door toward town.
The Demon Lord replaced his wallet. “This is going to be great!” he said as she left.
Jaygor just rolled his eyes.

“Hello?” the Hero called. His voiced echoed through dark, empty corridors.
“This way,” said Jaygor, unexpectedly from the side.
The Hero jumped, but then followed Jaygor through the twisting passages of the dungeon.
“Say…” he said, after a short time. “So why are you all down here?”
“I’ll leave that to the Demon Lord to explain,” said Jaygor. The Hero detected a note of bitterness in his tone.
They arrived in a dimly-lit chamber carved out of the living rock. The Demon Lord was seated, uncharacteristically, at a small wooden table.
“Would you like some coffee?” asked the Maid.
“Yes, please,” the Hero said.
There was silence for several moments, as the Hero struggled to articulate the question.
“I had to rent out the Black Castle,” the Demon Lord said.
“Oh?” said the Hero.
“I became over-extended on my credit card,” the Demon Lord said.
Jaygor stared daggers at the Maid.
“How was I supposed to know that magic beans were so expensive?” the Maid said, pouring the coffee.

The Demon Lord came to his breakfast table in the dungeon. The Maid poured coffee while Jaygor brought him his morning paper. He unfolded the paper, then squinted, trying to read the indistinct print in the dim light.
“Why do you still read a paper, Lord?” asked Jaygor. “Why not use a magic scrying glass or something?”
The Demon Lord smiled.
“It’s something you young people can’t understand,” he mused. “The sound of the rustling paper… The feel of newsprint… The smell of the ink…”
He unfolded the paper the rest of the way, then scowled. Inside, there had been a print registration error and the text was unreadably blurry.
“Jaygor!” he barked.
“Yes, Lord!”
“Bring me my scrying glass!”
“At once, Lord!”

Just recently, I introduced a new character: the Saintess. The Saintess is also a tropey character from manga.

The Hero and Saintess were deep in the Forbidden Forest.
The Saintess pulled out the map and studied it for a minute, then finally threw her hands up.
“This is hopeless!” she said. “Admit it! We’re lost!”
“What do you mean?” asked the Hero.
“We have no idea where we are!”
“We’re right here!” the Hero said, pointing down.
“But where is ‘here’?” she pressed.
“The Forbidden Forest?”
“Argh!” She gnashed her teeth.
“Look!” the Hero said. Up ahead, they could see a sign.
The Saintess made a glad cry and ran forward to see what it said.
The Hero strolled up to the sign. It said “Forbidden Forest.”
“See?” he said. “I was right!”
“I hate you,” she said.

The Hero and the Saintess followed a dark, winding path under a canopy of immense trees draped with moss and vines.
“Why do they call it the ‘Forbidden Forest?'” asked the Hero.
“The Forest is a queer place,” the Saintess said. “Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak.”*
“So it’s ‘woke,’ is what you’re saying?”
The Saintess started.
“Well… That’s not really…”
The Hero stretched his arms. “It sounds like my kind of place!”

*Note: The statement by the Saintess about the Forest is a direct quote from Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, when Merry and Pippin are talking about the Old Forest.

“Do you even know what direction we’re going?” the Saintess asked.
“Sure,” the Hero replied. “We’re going this way!”
“No!” she said. “Which of the cardinal directions? Are we going north? Or east?”
“I know how we can tell,” the Hero said. “Moss grows on the north side of trees.” He pointed at a nearby tree.
“There is moss on every side!” she snapped.
“Ooh! So that means that every direction is north. Now we know exactly where we are: We’re at the South Pole!”
“I hate you,” she said.

I was particularly pleased with these last two. They’re short and punchy with a clear sense of story: a clear problem with a satisfying resolution — though perhaps not so satisfying for the Saintess.

I’m finally starting to feel like I can be productive writing fiction again. As I said at LOSCon, I’ve always found that my creative output is extremely uneven. But maybe it’s time — time to get serious about getting some new work done.

an iris which means "message" in the language of flowers

When I wrote Revin’s Heart, I realized that one thing that the protagonist couldn’t really do was talk about plants. He didn’t have any background to have learned about plants.

I love plants and wanted a character that could talk about them. So I wrote in a botanical garden and a curator to run it, Lady Cecelia. She appears for the first time in Storm Clouds Gather. She didn’t have much backstory at first. Momo, one of Revin’s love interests, addressed her as “aunt” so she was the sister of the Baron’s wife.

She appears again in Then They Fight You when Revin wants to make a corsage and Cecelia advises him regarding flowers to choose:

“These yellow lilies are pretty,” Revin said, remembering the yellow dress Momo wore on the first day he met her. 

“Oh, no,” Cecelia said. “No, no, no. In the language of flowers they mean falsehood. No, a white lily, that would be more appropriate. Or perhaps one of these orange blossoms — those mean ‘purity equaling loveliness’. Does that suit, Sir Revin?”

I was fascinated by the idea when I first learned about the language of flowers. I wrote a blog post in 2020 describing it and mentioning some haiku I wrote (unfortunately posted at twitter) that were inspired at the time by the language of flowers.

I subsequently wrote a whole series of novelettes, Lady Cecelia’s Journey, that tell her backstory. I had hoped these would start appearing by now, but they haven’t. The language of flowers plays a small role in one of those stories as well.

For the Wandering Shop Stories prompt today, the word was #rue which immediately put me in mind of the language of flowers. so I wrote a brief story fragment featuring Cecelia and her sister Serena.

Serena entered the botanical garden in Ravensbelth.

Cecelia was taking notes in her notebook. She looked up and smiled.

“And how is my sister this morning?” she asked.

“I am well,” Serena replied. “But I need to send a bouquet to… an acquaintance.”

“We have a lot of nice blossoms,” Cecelia replied. “Some roses are blooming, as well as nasturtiums and mallows.”

“Oh, no,” Serena said. “No. Do you have any rue?”

“Ah,” Cecelia said. “So this is that kind of bouquet. Yes, I have some rue. And what else would you like?”

“Evening Primrose? Saint John’s wort? Tansy?”

Cecelia sucked air through her teeth.

“My… Yes, I have those.”

Serena thought for a moment.

“Any colt’s foot?” she asked.

Cecelia shook her head. “No, those are out of season.”

“A pity,” Serena said.

“Would you like me to cut and arrange them for you?” Cecelia asked, getting out her clippers.

“No,” Serena said. “For this, I’d like to do it myself. But would you keep me company?”

Cecelia smiled and nodded.

In the previous times that I wrote about the language of flowers, I included in the text what the meanings were, so the reader would know. But this time I didn’t. So I thought I might clarify using this blog post. Here’s what Cecelia and Serena are talking about:

Rose: Love (and many varieties with similar meanings.)

Nasturtium: Patriotism.

Mallow: Mildness (and several varieties with similar meanings.)

Rue: Disdain.

Evening primrose: Inconstancy.

Saint John’s wort: Animosity. Superstition.

Tansy: I declare war against you.

Colt’s Foot (tussilage): Justice shall be done you.

These meanings are drawn from Language of Flowers by Kate Greenaway (1846-1901).

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Wandering Shop Stories, a prompt for writing microfiction on Mastodon and Bluesky, begins its third year in 2026. It has grown modestly from having three to six curators and nearly 200 followers. Every morning, at 5am Eastern, a post appears on both services with a prompt for the day that proposes an ordinary word with multiple meanings that invites people to write a short piece of microfiction that includes the word and to tag the post so that everyone can follow along.

Starting this year, we decided to add a new wrinkle. Until now, we just selected a word based on the day of the year (day 1 to day 366 — on leap years). This year, we decided to track calendar days and holidays, to allow us to consider specific words for special days. This isn’t to say that we necessarily will, but we added the infrastructure to make it possible.

In technical terms, our new curator Gary created a new column in our spreadsheet with the dates and then we repurposed the “explanation” column to list holidays. I added in a few US and Japanese holidays. (For several years, I’ve been subscribed to a Japanese holiday calendar in my daily calendar, which has been a source of great enjoyment and enrichment.) Then Nara and others went through and added a bunch more holidays from various calendars.

Once we had the structure laid out, I modified the python script that actually makes the posts. I reworded the post slightly and added a conditional to only identify the holiday if it is a holiday. When I made the change, I got the syntax slightly wrong so, this morning at 5:00am, the script ran and failed with an error. When I woke up a few minutes later, I checked and, seeing the post hadn’t gone, logged into the server to check the error log. I had forgotten a colon (well, two actually). So I added them and ran the script manually.

Post by @wss366@wandering.shop
View on Mastodon

I really love our little #wss366 community! I love writing to the prompt every morning myself as a creative warm-up for the day. Furthermore, it’s been a real joy for me to see other people engage with the prompts and to read the contributions they write. And every quarter that our little group of curators has met via zoom to chat has deepened my appreciation for our quirky little community. Thank you both to participants and curators for investing your time an energy to bring our little community to life. Here’s to another successful year of Wandering Shop Stories.

old jelly jar

As I reflect on my year of writing in 2025, it was a somewhat discouraging year. I did quite a bit of fiction writing, but almost none of it got published. I wrote 26,000 words of short fiction and did 20 submissions. Zip.

I also worked on longer fiction. I finished the 19,000 word manuscript for Ecorozire! the third novella sequel of Revin’s Heart. It’s not clear when they might ever see the light of day. I also finished a 43,000 word rough draft of my new novel The Ground Never Lies. It still needs a lot of work and fleshing out, but I haven’t managed to get to revising it.

The high point was that my first novel, A Familiar Problem finally came out. I wrote it in 2022 and it was rejected five times before being accepted for publication. I signed the contract in 2024 and the original scheduled publication date was December 2024. But it was delayed, first until January and then June. And it finally came out December 10, 2025. I had planned to use 2025 to promote it and scheduled myself to appear in conventions. But, over and over again, I was going without the new book to promote. This was rather discouraging.

I also had the discouraging interaction at Worldcon that left a rather bad taste in my mouth. I ended up having to interact with the other author again at LOSCon. If I hadn’t already made the arrangements to travel to Los Angeles, I probably would have canceled going. We got through it, but it really raised the tension — at least for me. I otherwise had a good time. I had many other positive interactions and, uncharacteristically for me, I managed to meet a lot of new people. And it was fun to unbox A Familiar Problem. Having a new book come out counts for a lot.

So, not everything this year was discouraging.

I did write a lot of blog posts — more than 80. Most are about stuff I was doing. A few were about news or writing. I wrote an Awards Eligibility post. OK. That was a little discouraging.

I also wrote an article about bookselling for SFWA Planetside that is scheduled to appear in January. I have a companion blog post that I will release at the same time.

I was re-elected to a full term as Secretary of SFWA. The difference between service last year and this year is striking. When I joined the Board, SFWA had lost essentially all of its leadership and staff. With fresh leadership, we hired new staff who hit the ground running and really engineered a transformation. The Board has been able to return to developing strategy. Whereas, last year was all frenetic activity, this year has been more relaxed. That’s not to say there haven’t been moments of controversy and high drama (like yesterday). But, no matter how bad it’s been, it’s been better than last year.

My service to the Straw Dog Writers Guild continues. I run Straw Dog Writes and serve on the program committee. I ran the online meetup nearly every week for the second — going on third — year. The regular group is small, but lively, with a mix of less frequent participants. On behalf of the program committee, I invited and hosted several talks during the year. I also served on a committee to review candidates to potentially update the website. I was excited and encouraged to draft the recommendation that was taken to the Board but, unfortunately, nothing ever came of it. Maybe that was another discouraging thing.

Wandering Shop Stories is an ongoing pleasure. We have 168 followers on Mastodon and 69 on Bluesky. Asakiyume frequently boosts and offers thoughtful comments on contributions. We’ve held genuinely enjoyable quarterly meetings aligned with the major solar events (solstices and equinoxen). And we’ve brought on one or two new curators. I write to the prompt most days, although occasionally I use snippets of works-in-progress or even bits of published works. It’s a great creative warm-up exercise in the morning. And reading the contributions by other authors and interacting with the small community that has sprung up around the project is always a treat.

I also participate in a number of other writing prompts on Mastodon and Bluesky, including #WritersCoffeeClub, #WordWeavers, #PennedPossibilities, #ScribesAndMakers, #Writephant, #LesFicFri, #WIPSnips, and probably others. The community of writers on Mastodon is particularly strong and supportive.

The year was also the middle half of my phased retirement. It’s weird to think I’ll teach Writing in Biology just once more this spring. I’ve been teaching this particular class since 2002 and am ready to be done. It’s been hard to keep it fresh and, honestly, seeing the end of the road ahead, I haven’t tried very hard. I realized recently that, when I fully retire in August, I will have spent 30 years — basically half my life — employed by the University. That seems like something that calls for further reflection — and should probably be the subject of its own post.

My year in writing has been a year of transition. During the spring, I negotiated with my employer to begin a phased retirement. I was distracted during much that time trying to figure out all of the ins-and-outs of this huge life change. There’s a lot to learn and a huge number of details. Luckily, my life partner is good at this sort of thing — much better than me — and she did the lion’s share of the work. I’m so lucky to have her. But starting this fall, I began teaching half-time, which has freed up a lot of time for writing.

I attended several events related to my writing. I was both a participant at Arisia in January moderating a panel on gender and sexual identity in media and serving on several other panels. I was a participant at Boskone during February where I served on panels about evolution and romance. I ran the Small Publishing in a Big Universe (SPBU) Marketplace table at the Watch City Steampunk Festival. I also ran Water Dragon and SPBU tables at Readercon in July.

I offered several readings as well, at Arisia, Boskone, and for Straw Dog. I mostly did readings from Better Angels: Tour de Force with selections from Military Morale Mishegoss and all of The Super Sticky Situation.

To support sales of the signed edition, I made a Better Angels ‘zine similar to the Revin’s Heart ‘zine with snapshots and descriptions of each of the Angels with their vital statistics and “three measurements.” I was really pleased with how it turned out — especially the pictures of the individual Angels. They’re really kyuto!

I continued to offer Straw Dog Writes for the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild. Roughly forty people have signed up or attended at some point, The average attendance was four with a range of 1 to 9. Attendance was lower during the summer but a few loyal attendees came nearly every week.

I set up and ran Wandering Shop Stories beginning in 2024. I have written a story fragment almost every day as a warm up exercise. We have four or five other participants nearly every day. In December the server we had used to operate the bot was scheduled to shut down, so I migrated to wandering.shop. Nearly 100 people have signed up for the feed. And in late November, I created a bot to offer the prompt on Bluesky as well.

I had two works published in 2024. The collected edition of Revin’s Heart came out from Water Dragon Publishing with the original seven novelettes plus three “side quests” — short stories from the perspective of other characters. I also had a short story, Always a Destroyer, selected for the anthology Romancing the Rainbow by Knight Writing Press.

I have signed the contract with Water Dragon Publishing for A Familiar Problem. A young man desperately wants a strong magical familiar but, instead, is captured and made the familiar of a powerful demon that intends to train him up for something. But what? The book is tentatively scheduled to be released in January 2025.

I did a lot of writing. I finished writing a new series of six novelettes: Lady Cecelia’s Journey with a seventh omake novelette for the extended edition (totaling 74,000 words). I’m calling it a sapphic romantasy road story:

Love blossoms between two young women, aristocrat and commoner, who risk everything to pursue a life together in face of parental and societal disapproval. Their hope takes them from their small town, across the island, to the Capital following the passionate dream that they can be together openly.

I also have written tens of thousands of words of The Ground Never Lies another sapphic romantasy about a geomancer with an anger problem who thinks herself unlovable, but discovers a capacity for love she believes she had lost. I had developed an original outline and when I finished writing it, I realized I only had about half a novel. But then I realized that I could write another timeline of the events that led to her disillusionment and intersperse the two timelines. At least that’s the plan.

I have several other works in progress. I have two novellas written as sequels to Revin’s Heart with a third in in progress. I’ve written several other short stories set in the same universe as Always a Destroyer.

In the fall, when the candidate for Secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) dropped out, I proposed myself as a write-in candidate. In October, I was elected and took office on November 1. It’s been an interesting experience and a good fit for what I can offer to an organization. It’s been a steep learning curve to get up to speed with the current challenges and culture of the organization. But I’m very happy with the rest of the leadership team and feel appreciated for making a useful contribution.

Not everything went well in 2024, however. I was very disappointed when I was not offered a participant role at Worldcon in Glasgow. I had already purchased plane tickets and lodging. I ended up deciding not to go. I was able to recover some of what I had spent, and it turned out that many many people got COVID, so it was perhaps for the best.

I have some exciting plans for 2025 that I look forward to sharing soon.

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Wandering Shop Stories, a writing prompt that began in January and recently migrated to wandering.shop, has now taken a new step to be more available to the wider SFF community: We ‘re now on Bluesky too!

It looks like the announcement that birdchan would start using everything everyone posted to train its AI finally roused a huge number of people to get up and leave the Nazi bar. And it appears that Bluesky is where the SFF community is going to land. Personally, I find this a bit disappointing as Bluesky is funded by venture capital. It’s currently very nice, but I suspect it will inevitably become enshittified. But, like it or not, that’s where the vast majority of the SFF community is going.

I decided, therefore, to see if I could create a bot to share the Wandering Shop Stories prompts at Bluesky in addition to Mastodon. I still prefer the vibe at Mastodon and am not planning to leave. But I’d like to be able to cross-post stuff. So it would be nice if the #wss366 hashtag would reference something. And there may be people that would like to play along at Bluesky. So, I decided to see how difficult it was to adapt the python script I use for Mastodon to also post at Bluesky.

It turned out to be super easy. Well… Sorta.

It also turned out that when I installed the atproto library, it updated something else that caused the Mastodon bot to quit working. I hate when that happens. After spending a few hours fighting with it, I decided to just do a side-install of a newer version of python and use a virtual environment to make sure that everything was separate from the system install of python. I should have done that in the first place, honestly.

Then, everything worked. Well… Almost.

It turns out you can’t just emit text and have it auto-format it, like it does if you post it. You have to run it through the filter on the client side to build rich-text using a utility called “textbuilder” before you submit it. That was a bit cranky and not well documented. But, eventually, I got that to work just tickety boo.

I used to do this kind of technical work all the time. It’s nice to see that I still can navigate programming and building reliable unix services. But, honestly, I’m pretty glad it’s not my day job anymore. My father always described these kinds of things as “just like using a computer.”

In the end, I’ve found spending a few minutes a day writing a very short story — especially when I’m otherwise too busy — to be really helpful at sustaining my creativity. The prompts that we choose are aimed to be ordinary words that have multiple meanings, so you can spin them a bunch of different ways. I love how it makes me feel to write something short and sweet.

Even more, I love seeing the contributions that other people make. I’m looking forward to seeing what people on Bluesky choose to contribute!

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On November 1, 2024, the curators of Wandering Shop Stories met up via Zoom for the first time. We had, in fact, cast a wider invitation, but we were the only ones who came. We had a good discussion.

We spent a bit of time just meeting one another (some of us for the first time) and talking about writing in general. But we quickly turned to Wandering Shop Stories. I spent a little time just reviewing the history of how wss366 came to be and contrasting it with vss365, which had been the inspiration.

All of us are very satisfied with how the project is working. We talked a bit about choosing prompts. We agreed that our current practice of choosing ordinary words that have multiple meanings gave us the most satisfactory results. We debated the importance of avoiding repeats (probably worth doing, but not always worth the time or effort).

Our initial impetus had been to discuss how we approach writing our story fragments. Each of us approaches it somewhat differently and it was fascinating to hear the various strategies.

Finally, I was able to announce that wandering.shop had approved allowing us to migrate from botsin.space that recently announced they were shutting down. I had originally chosen botsin.space because they welcomed bots and I sorta kinda personally knew the guy that was running. He had recently come to the conclusion that he needed to either substantially gear up to support the increased demand or shut down. He decided he really didn’t want to make the commitment to run the service, so he announced it would shutdown in mid-December. I approached the staff at wandering.shop and, after some discussion, they established a set of rules for allowing bots (from known members in good standing under defined conditions).

On November 3, I reviewed the documentation and made the necessary changes to migrate the bot. I was reminded of how straightforward it is to work with Mastodon as compared with when I did set up bots for birdchan and Discord. It only took me a a couple of hours to create a new account, configure it to receive the posts from my script, update the script, test, and then trigger the migration of followers from the old to the new account. It went about as smoothly as could be imagined.

We hope to have more meetings periodically. Perhaps we can have the next one between the holidays to talk about getting ready for the new year.