Mastodawn

Eve Ventually Aug 4, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 1: Introduction round: There are both "old rabbits" & "new noses" among us. Give us a brief introduction about yourself & what you're currently writing. You can also use this as self-promotion.

On the pens I specifically name on this account, I write erotica and erotic romance. I have five stories already available that you can check out in my index post. I'm currently working on a story called Beware Of Fangs! which takes place in my Dryadis Romances setting. It involves a romance between a young vampire woman with a mysterious past and a woman who says she doesn't date women or vampires.

Prompt thread here.

Eve's Hallow (@[email protected])

Story index: ## Fantasy * [Don't Get Seduced By A Fairy!](https://books2read.com/b/bWaN0z) **MF**, erotic romance * [Fling With A Daphnaie](https://books2read.com/b/bpxPLX) **MF**, older woman, age gap, erotica ## SciFi * [Following My Siren's Thorns](https://books2read.com/b/bQ1OKZ) **FF**, spanking, erotica, and ***Too Hot For Amazon™*** * [The Emperor in Ochre](https://books2read.com/b/4NqBE6) **FF, FM**, Why Choose, erotica ## Contemp * [Seduced by the Cougar Next Door](https://books2read.com/b/bPaypj) **MF**, older woman, age gap, erotica Learn more at [ChantingLureTales](https://chantingluretales.writeas.com/)!

Toot.Cat

Eve Ventually Aug 4, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 2: What were your favorite stories as a child?

My access to books was, in its own way, as limited as my access to any other media as a child. I could access a lot of classic fiction written before 1900 ... and Chronicles of Narnia. With those limitations in mind, I really enjoyed The Swiss Family Robinson and read it who knows how many times. Same for some of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Do they (the stories I read as a child) influence what you write today?

In two specific ways. In The Swiss Family Robinson, the family are stranded on an island that has incredible resources but no one living on it (to my recollection). Rather, there are people living near it who come there on the reg. The dad is always saying that the island will provide. Those two elements are very silly. If there are people near by, why wouldn't they want to live on this fabulous island? The story lampshades 'the island will provide' by having the mom call the dad out on it. And then the lampshading is subverted when the island does indeed 'provide' a spouse for one of the sons. (Which is an extremely gross concept.) The sense that this influences me is that I don't want to do things that have very silly flaws in them or things where it's supposed to be an adventure story but the challenges are almost superfluously easy to overcome.

I avoid giving the same answer twice and I've talked about Chronicles of Narnia somewhere. However, I can't find it so ... briefly. In addition to the allegory for Christianity in the stories, some of the stories go hard for some colonialism apologia. I see the same thing when I watch Life of Brian. The movie talking about the good that they think the Roman Empire has done becomes a stand in for the British Empire and the 'backward'ness of the conquered peoples becomes a stand in for the people that the British Empire conquered. There's the same kind of crap in the Chronicles of Narnia. Now that I can see that, I want to avoid doing that or anything like it in my work.

#FantasticPromptsEnglish

Eve Ventually Aug 4, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 4: What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about your story?

Paige's backstory of how and why she became a vampire and the loneliness she had before and after.

Eve Ventually Aug 5, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 5: If you could give your former self some advice, what would it be?

I don't know. It's kind of hard to say. I wouldn't like to be one of the ones learning some of the lessons the hard way that I've learned by watching others.

Eve Ventually Aug 6, 2025

What would you advise your main character (MC) regarding the situation in your story?

Speaking to Nicole (in Beware Of Fangs!), I probably wouldn't. There are things you have to figure out for yourself and your gender and sexuality are like ... right at the top of the list. Luke tries to encourage her to consider that she may, in fact, not be straight like she's been presuming. That's at the very outer edge of what I think is reasonable for someone to do ... and only if they're as close as Luke and Nicole are and the Nicole side of the equation is self-sabotaging as hard as she has been.

I'm happy to tell Paige she's gotta find someone she can open up to. The reasons she became a vampire and the things she experienced in the lead up to that and the immediate aftermath are serious. She wouldn't be imposing if she built the right friendship with the right person.

Eve Ventually (@[email protected])

Content warning: re: writing smut - Beware Of Fangs!

Toot.Cat

Eve Ventually Aug 7, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 7: What advice could your main character give you regarding your situation, everyday tips, work area, or something similar?

I suspect either one of them could tell me I need to have an argument with someone or other. Although, I'd probably tell Paige the same thing.

Eve Ventually Aug 10, 2025

How do you feel about reworking texts without the author's knowledge to include advertising? (Search query: advertisement for Maggi soup in a Star Trek novel)

Jake Sisko said it best. It's one thing to make agreed upon edits to words but, if you're putting words into my story that I haven't agreed to, you're breaking a sacred trust. And you're putting words in my mouth.

Edit: I messed up something in the scheduled post. Hopefully fixed now.

#FantasticPromptsEnglish

Eve Ventually Aug 11, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 11: World-building through advertisements, something particularly popular in video games. What do you think about this & would you use something like this in your work? (Examples: The Outer Worlds, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 4 & 76)

Philip K. Dick is one of my earliest touchpoints for this. He had ads play in flying cars by way of a mechanical fly that got in and blasted the ad. Not the only example but it is very evocative. It explained so much about the world of the story he was telling. While we don't have flying bugs advertizing to us, we do have an ad culture that's nearly impossible to avoid. Something is always selling us something. It's very PKDickian.

I think ads in a story can work out well. I'm certainly going to use it in my mainstream series at points. It's just not something that has worked inside my erotic and erotic romance settings so far.

Eve Ventually Aug 13, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 13: Your work has been selected for a special edition with a foreword by another person. Who should write it?

Limiting myself to my smut and smutty authors ... Chuck Tingle. As a buckaroo, it would be my honor to have Dr. Chuck Tingle write the foreword to my collected works.

#ChuckTingle #LoveIsReal #Buckaroo #ProveLove

Eve Ventually Aug 14, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 14: You awaken in your story. What do you do?

Very first? Try to figure out if I'm a creature that would be considered mythical in our world.

Eve Ventually Aug 17, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 17: Question for writers: What is something you'd like to do but haven't been able to do yet?

Make a living at my creative efforts.

Eve Ventually Aug 18, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 18: Follow-up question: Do you have a character who can do this?

Have a creative who can make a living being creative? Not presently. I've yet to see someone write a story about, say, a writer and not have the writer aspect of the story irritate the ever living shit out of me. I'm not going to write a story about a writer unless I'm positive I can do it in a way that won't have me suffering from cringe.

Eve Ventually Aug 19, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 19: Is there a self-insert in your work, a character that corresponds to you?

Every character I write has something of me in them and something of them in me. I don't think I could do a self-insert justice, though. I generally judge myself a little too harshly to write a reasonable, well-rounded character while intentionally writing them as an insert for me.

(This isn't fishing for compliments. I appreciate the impulse but I tend to distrust personal compliments for reasons that I'm not getting into here.)

Eve Ventually Aug 21, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 21: Are there topics you'd like to explore but just don't have the courage to do so?

No, not particularly. There are some themes I feel the need to wait on. Those mostly relate to things where I'm pretty sure I need at least a sensitivity reader for. I'm a one enby shop at this point.

Eve Ventually Aug 22, 2025

Are clichés always bad? What do you think?

I'm not entirely sure there's such a thing as a cliché. A little bit like a Mary Sue. If we look at the common definition of a Mary Sue and evaluate it objectively, it's hard not to read Batman as a Mary Sue. Whatever complaints you may have about Batman, it's likely being a Mary Sue isn't one of them.

The word cliché gives folks a way to talk about a thing they dislike without necessarily analyzing the theme itself. Instead, it gets categorized 'cliché' and therefore, we can safely assume, bad. I don't think cliché has its roots as firmly in misognyny as Mary Sue. The concept likely does get used more against the marginalized because it's being interpreted through Western cultural lenses.

I don't think writers should be overfocused on clichés. But you can intentionally use them to misdirect and give payoffs that feel more substantive for having thwarted expectation.

#FantasticPromptsEnglish

Eve Ventually Aug 22, 2025

(...) you can intentionally use them to misdirect and give payoffs that feel more substantive for having thwarted expectation.

In the groggy light of morning, I somewhat wonder if this could be used in a "not like other girls fics" sense. I wouldn't really appreciate that but it's not like I can stop you.

There was another paragraph in the draft. I took it out before posting because I felt like it was an unnecessary sidebar. Without the missing paragraph, what had always been the final paragraph feels a bit like it was driven off a cliff.

Eve Ventually Aug 23, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 23: Describe your story from the perspective of a character of your choice who isn't the main character.

Luke: My best friend finally starts dating a woman. On accident. 🙄

(This is Beware Of Fangs! His best friend is Nicole.)

Eve Ventually Aug 24, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 24: You and your most recently written character wake up next to each other. What happened or what's happening now?

Keeping my own rules in mind about answers for mainstream works not going here ... that would probably be Paige. She'd be going to sleep slightly before I wake up (depending on the day of the week). Since she is a vampire, she'd go back to sleep and I would try to figure out how I ended up in Sylvestris.

Eve Ventually Aug 27, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 27: Do you have a favorite trope, or do you tend to avoid common tropes?

I think tropes are fun to look at on TV Tropes but I don't spend much time thinking about them when I'm not looking at that site. I'm theoretically a fan of the Xanatos Gambit but I doubt I'll never write a story involving one.

As far as writing them goes, I don't really write to trope.

Xanatos Gambit - TV Tropes

A Xanatos Gambit is a plan for which all foreseeable outcomes benefit the creator — including ones that superficially appear to be failure. The creator predicts potential attempts to thwart the plan, and arranges the situation such that the …

TV Tropes

Eve Ventually Aug 28, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 28: Emotion in writing. How do you deal with it when your emotional state blocks you from writing?

Having multiple projects active, basically. If whatever is causing the emotional state issues is too severe, that's not going to help but there are going to be times when writing isn't really on the list of options. In those cases, I recommend as much patience as you can give yourself.

Eve Ventually Aug 30, 2025

#FantasticPromptsEnglish August 30: To plot or not to plot? What's your path?

I'm a plantser. I need some idea of where I'm going or I get stuck too easily. Once I've got the roadmap, I occasionally refer to it if I'm not sure what I'm doing next. My characters stray from the path pretty freely.

@EveHasWords do you know much of Christianity or the Christian faith?

Eve Ventually Aug 4, 2025

@kontakinti Sure. I grew up in an evangelical, charismatic, non-denominational household with strong similarities to the Institute in Basic Life Principles.

The part I mentioned earlier in the same thread where I had limited access to media and books that were written from 1900 on relates strongly to the specifics of my upbringing.

Even at the time, I found the theology of those organizations a little flimsy so, as a seeker, I read widely inside various Christian traditions. I wouldn't consider myself an expert but I'm more knowledgeable than the average Christian.

Institute in Basic Life Principles - Wikipedia

@EveHasWords That's wonderfully amazing. You definitely sound like someone I'd be very keen to chat to. I'd love to share and compare our spiritual journeys thus far. Thoughts on CS Lewis? Also, seeing you're an IT buff of sorts (😅), I'm curious to know your views on Calvinism and freewill. I usually use Telegram for chats if you prefer there.

Eve Ventually Aug 22, 2025

@kontakinti Sorry for this extremely overdue response. I have mixed feelings on C.S. Lewis. Till We Have Faces is the one book of his prose fiction I still own (I might own one of his theological texts still ... A Grief Observed I think). I think it shows what he could do when he wasn't so hung up on his usual focuses when writing fiction.

It makes his other work seem shallow by comparison. In order to revisit, say, Mere Christianity, I'd need to re-read it with the knowledge I have today. I don't remember what it says. That's not really something I want to put the effort in today.

(1/?)

Till We Have Faces - Wikipedia

Eve Ventually Aug 22, 2025

@kontakinti My thoughts on Calvinism are in flux but not getting better. I've been reading up on Biblical scholarship (in part, through Dan McClellan's The Bible Says So) and that's giving me a lot better understanding of what went into making the Bible. I'm in a place where I understand that I don't yet understand what Christians call the New Testament. Prior to the start of that understanding, my feeling on Calvinism was that it was a man-made concept built on cherry-picked passages from the New Testament. I felt that holding a human interpretation of the Bible drawn on that kind of interpretation would necessarily be contrary to whatever truth is in the scripture.

Something McClellan has taught me is that anyone who is engaging with the "Bible" is necessarily negotiating with it. I feel like Calvinism is a bad-faith (in the argument sense) interpretation but my opinion on that may shift as I learn more. (Not to a point where I agree with Calvinism as an interpretation of the New Testament. It's just possible I may no longer feel like it's a bad-faith interpretation.)

(2/?)

Eve Ventually Aug 22, 2025

@kontakinti For free will, I think it's a philosophical construct. Like Pratchett says (through the character Death in Hogfather) about the concept of, say, justice or mercy, there's no atom or molecule of free will in the universe. We're trying to make it real.

I haven't decided whether I agree that it should exist. I think some concept of personal accountability is useful and probably not a bad thing. Putting that personal accountability over the reality of our nature probably isn't, though.

(3/3)

Eve Ventually (@[email protected])

Content warning: re: WritersCoffeeClub May 3: Terry Pratchett bonus

Toot.Cat