#99 cent fiction

[valerielillis]

My new pulp story is available for Pre-Order now! Feel free to check out the first two chapters for free on my author website.

[mdpthatsme]

Winter Solstice is here and Winter is unenthused about their Season; however, as ice and snow storms are cast into Weather Maker to disperse, an error catches Winter's eye. They investigate to find that the error is worser than they can ever fear. Someone - another Season - is interfering and creating a Dry Season. With the help of a cheerful weather worker, Winter must find a solution to this problem, or it could have devastating effects on the Mortal Realm.

Winter and the Dry Season is now available for ebook preorder at Amazon. It will be published on Winter Solstice, December 21, 2022. 

US: https://amazon.com/dp/B0BQ4LD6LR UK: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BQ4LD6LR MX: https://amazon.com.mx/dp/B0BQ4LD6LR JP: https://amazon.co.jp/dp/B0BQ4LD6LR

Find this and more of my stories on my website: https://mdpthatsme.wixsite.com/melissaplunkett

[claredugmorewrites]

Both my novel-length romances are on sale for 99Pence 99Cents from Feb 7- March 15. There's dual POV Contemporary Romance  ALL IT TAKES, and dual POV Sapphic Romance TRULY MADLY DEEPLY. http://claredugmore.weebly.com/sales.html

[cyallowitz]

'Do I Need to Use a Dragon?' Available on Amazon!

Cover by Alison Hunt This was the big and only release of last year.  Do I Need to Use a Dragon? was a challenge in that it wasn’t really fiction.  It was all about me trying to write a ‘how to’ book, which several people suggested.  Took me a few years to finish it since doubt kept rearing its head.  Pretty sure there are those who think I have no reason to write this book too, but time cannot…

[catstuffoddities]

On Sale This Weekend at Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZ125M6M

[richardmmulder]

Deception (Conquest: A Dystopian GameLit Saga Book 2) - Interlude 2: The Rapture

Deception (Conquest: A Dystopian GameLit Saga Book 2) – Interlude 2: The Rapture

Doug’s many years of paranoia had prepared him for just this kind of scenario. Having logged out of Conquest, he hurried around his apartment and grabbed his antiquated laptop, his 72-hour kit, his sawed-off shotgun, his sash filled with military grade 12-gauge shells, and his hidden wad of hundred-dollar bills, and scurried out the back door. He wasn’t exactly sure where Brittany’s body was, but…

[thesylverlining]

Happy Pride 2024! Have some Weird Queer books, games, and sounds!

Hey y'all, I'm RoAnna Sylver, and I write really queer books and interactive fiction about superheroes and vampires and space wolves and refusing to die - and EVERYTHING of mine is 50% off right now, individually or in a big beautiful bundle!

That's 7 books, 2 games, and my Indie Ink Award finalist audiobook CHAMELEON MOON!

Every single one of my books are also 99 cents on Amazon - And more importantly, every other book vendor I can reach!

Thank you so much for reading, whether my books or just this post. Thank you for still being here. I'm glad you are.

And to all of you:

Happy (defiant, quiet, introspective, angry, mourning, joyful) Pride!

[rad-roche]

Pulp Covers And How To Paint Them

With the rise of cheap printing in the early twentieth century, mass-marked paperbacks swept the world, each offering lurid thrills for obscenely low prices. Sex, sadism, and incredible violence for as little as ten cents. An easy purchase to slot in between fifty cigarettes a day and enough bourbon slugs to kill a small garden.

Pulp fiction is where some of the greats of American literature cut their teeth, including the big three, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett. The contents of these stories, both the dizzyingly good and astoundingly terrible, have been absorbed and digested and remixed and regurgitated in nearly every permutation imaginable, fuelling pop culture some one hundred years on. This isn't an essay on that. Nobody likes to open a tutorial and be greeted with a wall of text. The history is for another time.

But it is about how to paint it.

Don't let the pre-amble intimidate you, it's not as hard as it sounds. You will need:

Painting software with some image editing capabilities. You don't need all the bells and whistles of Photoshop, but I wouldn't recommend something like MSPaint, at least not to start with. I'm using Clip Studio Paint.

A really beat-up paper texture. The grungier, the better.

A lightly-textured brush. Here are the specific brushes I use, 99% of which is the well-named rough brush. Try and avoid anything with any impasto elements.

Go to your colour-picking tool and use the 'select from layer' option. Doing all the painting on a single layer is going to make your life easier.

A complete willingness to make mistakes and, instead of erasing, painting over them. It generates much more colour variation and interest! Keep your finger off the E key.

Good reference! That painting is a master copy of Mitchel Hooks' art for Day of the Ram. Find a style you really love and want to learn? Have no clue where to begin? Do direct studies!

Let's not worry about whatever is happening in the background. It's probably fine. Let's get started! Pulp magazine art is a lot more varied than you might first think, so don't agonize over having a style that 'fits' or not. I'm also specifically aiming for something you'd see on the cover after printing, not the initial painting they would use for printing. The stuff I'll show here is a pretty narrow band of it, but here are some general commonalities. This is a painting by Tom Lovell.

Let's dig into this.

The colours are very bright and saturated, but the actual values, the relative lightness and darkness of them, are actually grouped very simply! You can check this by filling a layer full of black, putting it on top and setting its mode to colour. If the value of a painting looks good, you actually get a lot of leeway with colour. But here's what I think is the most important thing to keep in mind.

The darks aren't that dark, and the lights aren't all that light! Covers are paintings reproduced on cheap paper. Anything you wouldn't want to happen in the printing process, you lean into. Value wash-outs, lower contrast, colours getting a weird wash to them, really gritty texturing. So let's get painting! Here's my typical setup.

That bottom folder is the painting itself. The screen layer is the grungy paper texture. To get the effect you want, put it down, invert its colour, then set it to screen. That washes out your painting far, far too much, so to compensate, I put a contrast layer up on top. Fiddle around with the settings, but this is where mine ended up sitting.

Note I'm saying this before even starting the painting: you want to do this as early as possible. This is where the 'select from layer' colour picker comes in handy. You can paint without worrying about the screen or contrast layer. Something not looking right? Enable your value check layer and keep painting. When you turn it off, it'll still be in colour. Here's a timelapse so you can see what that looks like.

And when you check the values...

They're pretty simple! This isn't a be all and end all, but I hope it serves as a decent primer. I want thirty dames on my desk by Monday!

[valerielillis]

In celebration of a new story of mine coming out later this month, my first published short story has gotten a new cover design! Be sure to pick up a copy if you haven't already!

[vsaintsin]

Writeblr Re-Intro

Yo! I'm V Saintsin. Or V or Vin or Saintsin or whatever you want to call me that sounds right on your tongue. I'm a self-proclaimed Social Media fumbler who got a late start to the party and has never quite figured it out. I hate how hipster and edgy it sounds to say "I'm bad at social media" but like I used to work with some people who actually managed the social media accounts for the business we worked for and there were rules and whatnot and damn, I think online media is just not my medium. That being said, here I am! Hah

I'm an author and general mess who's hoping to be the miracle man (somebody who makes a living writing silly little stories). I do use a pseudonym but please hear me out when I say I didn't realize how edgy it sounds, it just has some sentimental value to my personal life. I'm so sorry that I sound like I'm in my emo phase HAHA

About me -

He/Him Transguy from the American Midwest (arguably the south, depending on who you talk to, but the older people still say "Sodi-pop" and "ope").

I'm dysautonomic, bendy, permanently sleepy, and a survivor of Crappy Doctors Who Suck At Doctoring.

I like DnD, Pathfinder, Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk, Dragon Age, and other things in that vein.

I do make art of my stories and characters (Tablet is currently not working so I'm in a dry spell).

My writing background is predominantly ancient, dusty RPs from as far back as the foopets days and fanfic writing on Quizilla - I am an old and wizened elder of the net.

My formal education was music performance and behavioral neuroscience, I don't really know how I got where I am.

This is not my first rodeo with tumblr but it is the first time I have anything to SAY instead of just lurking.

In the event of malfunction, you can put me outside for 5 minutes and I'll probably factory reset.

My existence as I know it hinges on a massive number of sticky notes plastered throughout my room.

What I'm lookin' for -

Idk, whatever? I'm down for most things. Did you write it? Cool, let me see. I'm not too bent on genre or anything, just fascinated by the art of storytelling.

A bit tentative with fanfiction but that's just because if it's not a fandom I'm familiar with I am rather clueless about what the hell is going on and if it's a fandom I am familiar with I HUNT DOWN THE DEEP LORE.

I like art a whole lot, including fanart. Also art advice, love seeing things from different perspectives and learning something new.

Mutuals, really, for any reason. Building better connections on here, getting to know people. I am hideously bad at this but I try.

What I write -

Science Fiction with heavy subjects that matter to me - trigger warnings on a story-by-story basis.

High Fantasy (eventually books I think?) characters and their backgrounds for DnD and Pathfinder - I have been tempted to share these to help people get ideas or just for free use?

Things that I delete because I have crippling imposter syndrome and publishing makes me nauseous (doin' it tho).

Stories that I hope will make people feel less alone or that people could relate to, stories that I wish I had when life was worse and I was reaching out for anything I could find to keep me afloat, stories that try to be critical of things that SUCK in a way that's any helpful.

Lots of curse words and cussing (that's just how people talk 'round here), dubious science, things that I hope might make you cry but in a good way though.

Character-Driven stories that revolve more around the development of the person and less around the plot itself if that makes sense.

I've put blurb things below for my primary project/series which features a grumpy, queer, 37-year old chain smoking Frenchman and his misadventures with life and love and unbridled rage. If any of that sounds cool stick around and hang out? (This part is a plug bc I did a thing and I'm proud of it) And if my books sounds interesting the first one is 99 cents on Kindle and you just need a phone and a free app to read it!

THE SECRET OF LIFE (Published) - Sci-Fi/Psychological Thriller, Bi M Lead, Lovers to Enemies, AI but the oldschool cool kind not the real world thing that's stealing our future

Carlisle-Trystan Antoinette is a mercenary on a hard road, navigating life and death itself in an infinite cycle started by powers above his understanding. He has one mission - warn The Dianican Space Station of the coming threat and put a stop to a war that would encapsulate the whole of the Sol System before it can ever begin. Unfortunately for Carlisle, reality is a tenuous thing, made up only by our understanding of it. At least, according to his Psychiatrist, who tells him that there is no war, that he was never a mercenary, and that what Carlisle is experiencing is a severe but manageable psychotic break. Stripped of his combat enhancements, his bio monitor, and everything he's every known, Carlisle has a decision to make. Does he give in to the thoughts and memories, so real that he can almost taste them, or does he live a life of comfort and ease, returning to a husband and daughter that he left behind?

TWs: Domestic and War Violence, suicide, rape, medical trauma, grief, drug use

THE SILENCE OF ANGELS (Due July '24, TSoL 2) - Betrayal and Rage, Learning how to love again slow-burn romantic subplot, Learning how to Dad, A general inability for any one thing to just go right

(Quick Rough Blurb that offers no spoilers for TSoL) Making connections isn't easy for somebody who's accustomed to burning bridges. Isolation has always been Carlisle's mantra for surviving his life. Playing a role comes second nature, pretending to be the man that everyone else wants to see in him. When an old friend is murdered Carlisle finds himself as the primary suspect with all evidence pointing to him so clearly that even he calls to question what he is capable of. Unwilling to believe that he could commit such a heinous crime, Carlisle sets off to find the truth of his friend's death - was Carlisle framed or does he truly have the capacity to bring such harm upon those he loves? Old and new bonds will be tested, faith broken, and the future of everyone called into question as lines are drawn and sides are picked.

TWs: Violence, mentions of SA, graphic character death, more grief, more death

I don't know what else to say... Later!

[rivkae-winters]

This isn’t going to be a grand essay as I’m still feeling fairly low energy but I didn’t want to leave my two cents unsaid on this as it’s somewhat personal.

One thing I’ve noticed from all of the recent lore.fm events is the awareness of podficcing is much lower than I’d previously considered.

This is an absolute shame: podfics are great and there are many amazing narrators in fandom. One of the generalizations I saw made in the (regretably unarchived- lack of foresight on my part after I saved their videos) lore.fm comment section was how there was no natural sounding voice to read fan fiction at all ever and that’s why this proposed product was exciting for many of the people in those comment sections. Which is blatantly untrue as we have had natural voices even reading porn at times for years coming from the lips of actual people.

Obviously it’s not the same since not everything is a podfic all the time so check here for the fairly comprehensive guide @chaosisbeauty23 released recently covering native features of both iOS and Android devices and more.

Other than that though if there is a podfic scene in the space you find yourself in within fandom it’s well worth supporting. Narration is a skill and there is dynamism to the ebb and flow of a storyteller walking you down an author’s lovingly crafted web that is delightful. If you couldn’t tell I really do adore the podfic scene and certain podfic narrators have literally led me to new fandoms I wouldn’t have considered before with their voice and skill. It’s actually the reason why I still have blanket permissions attached to my work for recordings made by a living person reciting any of my works.

In that spirit: if you feel like checking just look up the tag ‘podfic’ on Ao3 next time you’re in your favorite tag! Or if you’re feeling adventurous just search through the podfic tag itself and find yourself somewhere new.

Typically you can filter by length as well and all the tags attached to the initial fic are typically on the podfic’d one. The podfic post is connected to the authors post as well via the ‘inspired by’ feature 99% of the time as well!

Fandom is an ecosystem of sorts and podfic readers are a native species here: they deserve more love 💜

[xenosagaepisodeone]

not that popular trends in consumer reading habits are above critique, but people who handwring over "the fanfictionfication of fiction" in particular confuse me because reader-insert romance of varying (<- being nice) quality has been a dominating genre since forever. half the people who attempt to make an assertion about about The State of Fiction while solely talking about booktok commercial paperback romance enthusiasts sound like "the west has fallen" chudjak meme, except they are hinging the validity of their claim on the existence of books titled things like The Lusty Irishman which their mom would probably have read when she was in college because she saw it at the grocery store for 99 cents.

[quinloki]

Canon Characters vs OC vs x Reader

Disclaimer: This is just my two cents, and my perspective on things, and I'm not trying to lay down the law for everyone. I needed to just put this to words though, in order to sleep.

I was thinking about this because of a post I saw, and some, we'll say, kind of useless comments associated with the post. Mean-spirited stuff.

Normally, in one ear and out the other, but the vibes just kicked me off down a rabbit hole of sorts an I wanted to try to put some of my thoughts to words.

First, some style vibes:

Canon x Canon Canon/Canon stories are, to me, like reading an episode of that show. I'm sitting down in front of a TV or whatever, and I'm experiencing the story As A Viewer. I like this style because I don't really have to expend much energy and I just kind of roll with whatever's happening. Generally some sort of 3rd person perspective.

OC x canon OC/Canon stories are like being on a carnival ride. I'm sitting in a car on a roller-coaster, and maybe the OC is sitting next me. I'm experiencing the story more deeply than strictly canon stories, but my connection with the OC is no deeper than say, my connection with Katniss Everdeen when I read The Hunger Games. Sometimes 3rd person, sometimes first person.

Reader x canon Reader/Canon (or Reader x/ OC) is like putting on a VR helmet. I don't get much physical input about the "Reader OC" because I'm experiencing the story through their eyes. I don't expect the reader to be me, but there's a bigger feeling of immersion to be had. Some description might happen cause it's relevant to the story, and it's still a type of ride, I can't jump the rails on the roller coaster, after all. (Even with a VN you still follow the tracks). Sometimes first person, sometimes second person (I'm partial to 2nd person perspective, but that's just me).

I love Fan Fiction, I love it. All of it, and man even more than anything, what I love is that I'm going to dislike 80% of it. Because that 80% was written for someone who is not me. (Hell, that number's probably closer to 99% if we're looking at ALL fandoms, but I digress).

Second - The VENT:

What got me the most in the post that prompted this, was someone saying "Bring back the Mary Sue OCs!" and then they went on to describe something more detailed, and I just -

Look, respectfully, fuck you.

The point is, you're not going to be happy no matter what. Whether it's "mary sue" OCs, or x readers, or alternative universes, or a ship you don't like, you're going to find something to be unhappy about.

Cause people have been bitching about all styles of fan fiction since the first "You've Got Mail" chimed in 1991. And until 1998 and ff.net you really had to hunt for it, and until 2007 and Ao3 the idea of tagging a fic for any reason wasn't really a thing. Every click was a surprise! \o/

I just have seen the same song and dance a dozen times. It's exhausting. People become okay with OCs and decide x readers are the enemy, and before that OCs were *all* Mary Sues and cringe and people who made OCs were the enemy, and before OCs people who wrote even a little OOC were the enemy, and people who wrote AUs were the enemy, and you can write fan fic but it HAS to be Canon Compliant, and everyone MUST be in-character at all times - "They would not fucking say that" was the enemy.

Look, just please - please - in any capacity, stop it with the "All X style of story telling is crap" mindset. There's over a dozen different ways to do x readers alone. I know 20 x reader writers and I don't think any of us have the same style, preferences, or vibes.

I've had a lot of comments along the lines of "I thought I hated x readers, but I really loved this." on a few different fics I've written. Sometimes it's not the style of the fic, sometimes it's the style of the writer, and my Brother In Christ - you're going to have to read some awful shit to shuffle through the thousands of writers out there to find the vibes that resonate with you.

Ostracizing entire swathes of fan fic because you need something to be "The Enemy" so you can lift up something else, and then bitching you can't find anything new to read seems like a personal problem.

And I know y'all are scrolling by TONS of posts that don't interest you, every day, as a matter of course. So don't give me that "clogging up the tag" BS, because we deserve to be here same as anyone else in the fandom.

[divinebunni]

it’s official ~ i’ve released my second tasty short read on kindle! it’s .99 cents or completely free if you have kindle unlimited! take a read, have a horny night, and prepare yourself for regular, weekly releases ~ it’s a fictionalized version of my real life, as well as fantasies to come and many many other sexy stories. and make sure you leave a review, share with your friends, and a comment for what you’d love to see next! i have so many stories in me, so stay tuned ~ please reblog !

[turtletotem]

Giant Queer E-Book Sale!

For today only! Queer fiction of all genres, on sale for only 99 cents -- including one of mine, Star Bright, which is usually $5.49. Quite the deal, y'all. Check out all 300+ at queeryourbookshelf.com!

[valerielillis]

My new pulp story is available for Pre-Order now! Feel free to check out the first two chapters for free on my author website.